The Dream Vessel (7 page)

Big Tom stepped into the dank, natural perfume of the garden shed—rotting leaves and fertilizer—and steadied himself against the seed bins. The aisle seemed to be swaying under his feet, something like walking the bottom hold of a storm-thrown skimmer.

When he had stumbled his way to the cat-boy Cantilou, he felt that recurring, uneasy surprise—a wash of cold saltwater prickling his scalp and rushing down his spine. The feline sat paws forward, motionless except for its eyelids lapping down over those wide ebony pupils-gone-wild. Big Tom bent at his thick waist and marveled again at the total wet blackness of those eyes.

The little-boy lips on the animal’s near-hairless face did not move, but there came the voice: “So, you think I am your madness, Big Tom?”

“Unh?” The merchant scratched at the front of his sweat-moist blouse.

“The skimmer is down and the crabs are feasting on what the feeder beasts did not bother with. The Lucia is well on its way to driftwood. But the dying won’t stop—will it?—until you let her go. That’s your madness.” The Cantilou whacked its tail on the manure-filled burlap.

Big Tom wiped his nostrils between thumb and forefinger. “A fool ’ud let the gold go. It’s mine, an’ my secret.”

“Ah,” replied the Cantilou, closing its eyes, “too many died, and not enough died.”

“Wha?” Big Tom squinted at the beast. “You mean me? Or who? Wha riddle is this?”

The Cantilou’s eyes remained closed, and it appeared then nearly lifeless.

Billister had a theory that there were two sides to the mainhouse. Not like front door, back door. But two ways of viewing the mainhouse, two aspects, depending upon who you were.

There was the illusory version that Big Tom and his wives and visitors saw—a breezy, open-air mansion, three tiers of polished wood, rattan and verandas. The servants saw the other side, of course—the whiskey bottles and vomit; the grain and fish and salted beef to haul up from dockside storehouses; the putrid garbage mound out back, fenced in and populated by a family of vulture macaws.

It was a notion that Billister entertained as he made his rounds of the building, pushing his two-wheeled maintenance cart before him—trash bin in the center, wipe rags and spray bottles of wood oil and glass cleaner hanging off either side. Working the mainhouse, Billister imagined, was not unlike it would be working backstage in one of the New Chicago theaters that Jersey Saple spoke of. Clean this, fix that—create the illusion of luxury inside a pile of boards and stones and mortar.

Billister had oiled the left wheel of his cart, for this was not a day to be making unnecessary noises around the mainhouse. Big Tom had finally slouched in from his office down the hill after a whiskey bender and, probably, a nasty measure of the powder. He had entered with his arms slung over the shoulders of two of his musclers, his feet dragging, nearly useless. He had been sweating like a docksman at noon, and his skin was fish belly white.

Poor Big Tom, mourning his son so. And the loss of his newest skimmer. The man never showed any emotion but rage. Sorrow was vented with a good mind sopping.

So Billister tip-toed in and out of the bedrooms emptying trash baskets, whisking at the floor with broom and dust pan, and wiping ashtrays. He could track an evening’s amusements throughout the house just by reading the cigarette butts—who was where for how long.

In the pale half-light of the anteroom to Big Tom’s bedroom, Billister righted a mahogany end table. Probably it had been upended by the careening master himself. Cautiously he paced into the bedroom. The windows had been thrust aside to allow in the curing fresh air, and someone had graciously hoisted the mosquito netting over the four-poster. Big Tom lay there on his back, wheezing and oblivious to the midday light streaming in.

Billister mashed his lips together and scanned the expanse of gleaming oak, trying to recall what areas of flooring would not creak as he went about his duties. He decided to empty the near trash basket, the one beside the headboard, and not risk venturing along the window side of the room. When Big Tom awoke, he would be in no condition to quibble about the housekeeping anyway.

In the basket there was nothing but a half-dozen torn and crumpled pieces of a photograph. It would have to be one of the late Dr. Scaramouch’s works, of course—how odd to destroy one—and Billister felt a mournful unease settle into his chest as he knelt to remove the pieces. Sad, the murdered doctor. The houseboy sighed and the depression deepened in the tomb-quiet room when he realized what had been the subject of the doctor’s photograph. Each shard of gray mounting showed a different section of a sleek new yacht in dry dock—undoubtedly the Lucia, for no other skimmer was so experimentally broad. This would have to be that photograph the doctor delivered the very night he was killed in the chemical room below the infirmary, the darkroom he called it.

What the trade master had obviously destroyed in a raging despair, Billister decided to make whole again and return to him at a happier hour.

Tacked to the rough paneling at Big Tom’s left was the original blueprint of the Lucia. Pinned to the wall below that was a photograph of the same skimmer, once ripped into six pieces and now remounted, the pieces glued flat and meticulously realigned. The white tear-gaps that remained had been inexpertly touched up with drawing lead. From fifteen feet away, one might think the photo had never been mangled.

Tacked to his drawing board before him was a sheet of drafting paper, wide and blank.

It was Sunday morning, and Big Tom gazed lazily in a hangover fog from the board to the motionless shipyard below. Most workers had the day off, as had been the custom since Jesus People worked the island generations ago. Only those in essential positions were on duty—Sanders Lafitte, for instance, down at the pub. And Big Tom considered that he could use an ale or maybe even two.

No. He returned to his ruminations over the Lucia II. From the scant witnessing that Bark had given him, he had to decide where he had gone wrong—if it was a bad design at all. Had he really been the victim of monstrous chance, as the excitable Bark had suggested? If he had not exiled the Jesus People from the island, he knew, they would be saying that the sinking had come by God’s will, some sort of cosmic comeuppance. Ach.

Big Tom heard the shouts of Captain Bull’s bargemen on the hillside. He hissed a long sigh, pushed himself back from the drawing board, and treated himself to a machine-rolled cigarette. This is what he had really come to the office for, and he could set aside his dalliance with the Lucia II.

Outside, leaning into the veranda rail, he sucked on the cigarette, thought how good it would go with an ale, and watched the procession winding down the shell-and-gravel main road. In front marched a haughty little toad-like man, huffing out an unintelligible count that seemed to make sense to the red-leggers shuffling behind. They were march-manacled, wrists to waistband and then to each other as well, front to back. For this no leg irons were needed—it moved things along, and an en masse escape was impossible. It was better that this be done on a Sunday, as some workers were still unaccountably haunted by the sight of the very commerce that fed them and their babies.

Big Tom listened to the count from the little, fat man. It sounded something like “Oad, umpa, thail, tu…, oad, umpa….” Around Rafers long enough, he supposed, and you pick up a few words.

From that, his thoughts drifted to the young Rafer, Billister, just the night before. Big Tom was barely aroused from a day’s bedridden stupor when the shave-head kid proudly presented him with the Scaramouch photograph, pasted together and retouched. The house boy’s eyes had glinted and begged for approval. Big Tom had twisted strands of his beard irritably, thanked him gruffly, and dismissed him.

But Billister had insisted on presenting the commander of the Caribbean with one more gift—a titillating shred of gossip to consider, that Quince the red-legger might not have buggered Dr. Scaramouch as everyone had suspected, that the escapee had not known of any such doctor. Not that Quince would have died any differently, Billister noted in his diplomatic smoothness, but it did raise the issue of whether there was some other murderer on the island.

And now Big Tom sucked in cigarette smoke, enjoying the satisfactory sting webbing across the tip of his tongue. His red eyes followed the procession, scores of ragged men and women, most of them gray-black of skin and all looking sickly and sad. A half-dozen of Captain Bull’s men kept pace alongside, jabbing at the laggards with the tips of their chopped shotguns, jovial at the prospect of getting off to sea toward the carnal lures of mainland.

Big Tom spat at the thought of having to keep the redleggers in the holds so long, and he wondered what discount he would have to surrender when they were sold finally to the Southland farming concerns. Money would be pig-ass tight until the gold was recovered. He wondered often about those farms, how they managed to keep a man secure yet working the land at the same time. And he thanked chance, or God, or whatever there might be to thank, that the red-leggers kept escaping and returning to their island homelands to be harvested again and sold again…

The first of the red-leggers reached the barges dockside, and Captain Bull’s men were detaching each of them and shackling them to stubby little posts spaced three feet apart on the barges. The barges themselves were not much more than rusty clusters of metal drums lashed to beams and boarded over. They looked dangerous to the ship-making mind of Big Tom, although he had heard of nay but a few sinking or even flipping over.

Captain Bull would be in the pilot house of the tug now, where he had retreated huffily when he was released from the hoosegow. He seemed to know he had been held on spurious charges and was grousing loudly when he was set free from the little ramshack jail. His bargemen were irritable themselves, but they calmed him down with a good ribbing. Better to get out and forget.

The last of the procession of red-leggers was snaking down the road now, and manacled at the very end was the one that Big Tom had come to see. That last manacled man—out of place, like a flower in the trash heap. Dazed, beaten about the face but healthy and muscular, a clean white tunic. Billister.

In the thought muddle of a mind bruised by whiskey and powder, Big Tom had argued with himself over whether to kill the house boy. From some painful corner of his brain came a stark admonishment—no. He had spared him as a baby some fifteen years ago and he would do it again now.

He did wonder, though, which was actually worse—a quick death, or the slow death that was the lot of a redlegger? He sucked on the cigarette butt, burning it down to his pinching fingers, and flipped it over the rail.

Yes, Billister, he thought, the doctor’s murderer is still among us on the island. And the murderer is me.

Inside, he ripped the photo angrily—into four-dozen pieces this time, a shower of little shards falling into the trash basket. His hand shaking, Big Tom flicked open his pocket knife and steadied it against his large belly. From the drawing table drawer he snapped up the metal cylinder, screwed off its top, and wondered where he was going to find a new house boy.

Rosenthal Webb’s lungs were gurgling with each breath and he felt feverish, but this was not a meeting to miss. There were only five other faces around the Revolutionary Council table, the others no doubt busy with mounting administrative chores.

We’re all getting stretched rather thin, Webb thought to himself.

Winston Weet was getting flushed in the face as he ranted to the council, and Webb instinctively knew to begin paying attention to the speech again. The round-faced orator was finally getting to the point. It was as if Weet’s guts constricted whenever he measured his words carefully, and this tightening forced blood up into his face.

“…and if the very existence of the Revolutionary movement owes itself to the theory that Government must serve its people, as opposed to the people serving the Government, I propose that our priorities should lie with the dismantling of the work camps.”

“He’s getting philosophical again,” Eliot Kohrn grumbled to himself.

Weet slapped the edge of the conference table. “I’m beginning to believe that we’re wasting too much time here tying ribbons and bows. The camps should have turned open and voluntary the day we nipped the Monitor’s head off.”

Virginia Quale broke in, “And the schools broadened, and scientific inquiries begun….”

“No,” Weet replied, whapping the table again, “none of those before freedom of the individual.”

“But as yet, we have so few of our own people in place in New Chicago,” Quale objected.

Weet frowned. “Sometimes I think we’re being more careful—ya, more paranoid—that the Monitor ever was. Who’s ta say that the populace will want us for leaders once we announce ourselves anyway? Why must we be in total control of New Chicago? Or is it that we’re afraid of what the populace will want—just like the Monitor?”

Webb tried in vain to clear his lungs with a cough, but spoke anyway with a slightly strangled sound: “Ya, the theory of it all is amusing ta bat about, but I say this—” he coughed again “—I say we’re down to no man power to even start such a mission. Ho, we can send a few freelance musclers to Chautown, have our people in New Chicago wire ’em authorization for this and that. But it will take a lot more than cable messages to prevent a massacre. Remember, there’s still a tangle of bastards in Merqua what would want the Monitor’s systems intact, even if he ain’t.”

“You go, Rosenthal,” said Kohrn. “You who’s so quick to jump into a mission, farther the better, when it’s the homeland what needs fixing. So quick to send Gregory off an’ then complain of man power.”

“My health like this, with this mud in my lungs, I couldn’t possibly start out,” Webb answered. “As fer Gregory, he’d be right for the job, the right temperament. But I can’t apologize for just asking him to contact a shipbuilder. He shoulda reported back by now. I say let’s hold up on this ’til we hear from him.”

Quale looked undecided, and her eyes darted from person to person around the table.

“I say we go on it now,” Weet huffed. “You have an able muscler down on Level Five right now—doin’ nothing but petting his willie. The big booger, guy with a scar on his nose—what’s his name?”

Webb’s face drained. “Fel Guinness? You’ve never been in the field with ’im. Disaster. A savage with a banger or knife when that’s needed. Fine. But trust him to a diplomatic matter? Disaster.”

“Perhaps you should have sent Guinness to strong-arm the shipbuilder, that Big Tom,” Kohrn put in. “Then Gregory would be here to recruit a team outta Chautown.”

“Disaster. Guinness on his own? Disaster.”

When the debate fell cold, Quale said, “So. I propose a vote: If Gregory is not back within a week, Fel Guinness leaves for Chautown.”

Not necessary, Webb said to himself. He could read the five other faces, and he had lost.

Webb rapped on a narrow plank door on Level Five and heard a muffled “Unh” respond within, which Webb took for permission to enter. When he stepped in, an object whirred past his ear and whacked into the door. A Rafer tosser disk bit into the pine, forming a perfect line with three other disks down the center brace.

“Thass pig-pokin’ dangerous,” Webb said, keeping his voice steady.

Fel Guinness slouched in his cot, leaning against the far wall. Unlike many denizens of the Revolutionary hideout, he had the tanned, weather-beaten look of a man who had spent much of his life out of doors. He had a strangely small head and large lips. He was frowning now, his right index finger still poised in the air from making the toss.

“Ah dint use the poison, Mr. Webb. That would be dangerous.”

Webb studied the inscriptions on the disks. He suspected that eventually someone would copy the nasty little weapons, but these were authentic Rafer.

“Where did ya get ’em?” Webb asked.

“Traded an old banger for ’em a while ago.”

“Hmph, doubt that,” Webb replied. “A proper Rafer wouldn’t have a use for a banger, wouldn’t go near one.”

“Oh ya. Guy I got these from weren’t a Rafer. He’d killed a few, though.”

Webb sighed. He was tempted to give Guinness a lecture on Revolutionary policies, but he thought better of it. Guinness already knew them well.

“Likely we’ll have a mission for you to run in a week or so,” Webb said. “So next time ya go prowling, don’t go too far.”

Guinness pushed his hands into the mattress and sat forward. “This got something to do with that big ship you keep talking about? That ship what’s gonna sail some of us over for a taste of European radiation, count of ours ain’t good enough?”

Webb leaned against the dresser, feigning patience. The room had a close, rotty smell, and he wondered if this room alone could be fouling the air of the entire complex. There was little decoration, save for the weaponry belts and bangers hung from nails around the wall. A small photo of a large-breasted woman, the blurry sort of porno snapshot sold by the street corner ruggers in New Chicago, was tacked to the wall beside Guinness’s cot.

Webb coughed. “Nah,” he said. “This is a run down ta Chautown. Need a team put together—I’ll give you some names of reliable men down there, time comes. The team will do the enforcing once we announce the dismantling of the forced labor on the Southland farms. Any trouble, make it work.”

Guinness scratched at his crotch. “That I can do,” he said.

“But I tell ya,” Webb said, pointing a nubbed finger into the air, “this ain’t a license to whack an’ chop anyone what don’t kiss your toes.”

“Me?”

“You been warned,” Webb said, turning to go.

“Hey wait, Mr. Webb!”

“Ya?”

“Show me that new tattoo?”