The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (13 page)

Gregory did not reply for a moment, and then remembered a conversation he had heard inside a fortified compound far back east, weeks ago. “Your point, then, is something like what Mr. Faiging was saying about Pec-Pec?” he asked.

“Yes. The Rafers just look at the world differently….”

“Back’ards.”

“From most. To them, civilization—goodness, art, security, the whole plumby thing worth living for—is spread across the wilderness. Cities are disease.”

“Pec-Pec thinks like that? We’re hauling into scrubland to find a man, some poking magic man thief who thinks like that? Like a Rafer?”

“Um. He not only thinks like that, but he is a Rafer, technically. I gully he’s something like the king of Rafers. Not that he ever lived among them—no. Visits now and then, fades in and out. They think of him as an itinerant god, always on the fringes where he can never be seen fully, never grasped as a whole.” Rosenthal Webb laughed. “The more I tell about Pec-Pec the more he sounds a bollocks. But believe, Pec-Pec would not have sent us to find Tha’Enton just to get our throats dillied. Any bugger who’s spent a lifetime eluding the Monitor can’t be all bad, eh?”

“You mean, the Monitor’s tracking this Pec-Pec, an’ we’re going to meet up with the man? Oh, poke—”

“No. I meant totally eluding the Monitor. My word is that—up to now, anyway—the Government doesn’t even know he exists.”

“But ho up a minute! You said you hadn’t seen Pec-Pec in a year. And when you asked Cred Faiging about him, you were barely trustful. How is it now that Pec-Pec sent us to pick up this bone-rattler?”

Rosenthal Webb had to stop and think, staring up from his sleeping bag into the nighttime star blanket. The memory was there in his mind clear as the moon: The dark-skinned magic man with his knotty little mustache telling him to visit the Wise and ask them about the warrior who also is a musician. But no, he hadn’t met with Pec-Pec since a year ago, long before this mission had been set in motion. So why was he so damned sure he and the magic man had recently had a conversation?

Webb propped himself up on his elbows and stared into the red coals of the camp fire long into the night.

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Nora Londi followed the monster through the blackness of the rocky tunnel until it widened into a massive, dimly lit cavern. Her first impression was that she was overlooking a city at night. Below there were orderly legions of yellow and red lights in precise patterns. Neighborhoods and thoroughfares more expansive, even, than New Chicago’s.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the illumination, she saw that the lights were not so distant. This was a cavern the size of twenty tobacco barns, and its floor was filled with rows of blocky cabinets, machines dotted with innumerable bulbs and gauges, some of the little lights winking on and off as their functions were called into play.

The dreadful beast stood in the center of the “city,” near a horseshoe-shaped desk laden with control panels and keyboards—an assemblage that gave Londi a sickening apprehension. The large bull-faced man was waving her on, beckoning and mumbling unintelligibly under the whir of machinery. His muscular mounds of skin glistened in the odd light—perhaps a little greasy from too many cannibalistic meals, Londi told herself. She descended the stony slope until she hit the polished stone flooring and looked back: The llama Diego and little Loo had emerged from the black tunnel and were following.

“…and stand right here in the center of the universe,” the hunched man was saying when she came within hearing range. “I don’t expect you to understand all of this, Nora. But these are thinking machines. They collect information, store it, assimilate and analyze. The way … just the way a brain does.”

“You thought there was a real Government? Well, not in New Chicago, no.” There was a wet hiss as he breathed deeply. He motioned grandly around the dark room. “There is a town of note takers and taxers, builders, Badgers, Inspectors. Bureaucracy. Mmm, to carry out my orders, but most of those groundlings have no idea I really exist. Or, at least, where I exist and in what form.”

“From here, one man—with assistance from little Loo—can control every population center on the continent. We monitor, regulate, all use of teletype, telephone, wireless. You won’t believe this, because you can’t see them, but there are actually ancient flying machines high above us. So high up that there is no air there. My flying machines. I found ‘em, figured them to be. One even has a meanly powerful camera. There is not much my machines don’t see or hear.”

Londi leaned against the rounded desk, feigning nonchalance. She poked at the nearest keyboard. It was made of worn plastic and carried the sheen of a well-used knife handle.

“These thinking machines,” Londi said, “that’s Old Age talk. They had the thinker boxes and the flying machines. There’s none of that now.”

The big man laughed. “There’s none of that, maybe, except mine! The computers have been here for centuries, perfectly preserved in the cool and dry of these caves. I had to build the turbine to power them. Then took another ten years to gully the machines themselves.”

Diego clopped up beside Londi and sniffed at the keyboard. Loo pulled him away by his neck.

Irritated, Diego asked, “Fly, hooma, machine? No … ooom, not legal.”

The monster’s bovine face brightened with pride. “I made that illegal!”

“So you would have the only ones?” asked Londi.

“Oh, don’t say it so sour. We must have some control! Technology, the reading and the writing.” He shuddered. “These things are for me. For the Government. That way the Government embodies all good, all progress. It cannot fail.

“But those flying machines, not even I actually have one to ride in, as the ancients used to. Mine are all in the sky. To bring them down would destroy them.”

Diego murmured pensively, “Hoooorma.”

“And what’s this little stick woman got to do with running the Government?” Londi asked gesturing at Loo.

“She talks to the computers so well that it saves me weeks of time, weeks of typing out the thinker box talk. It all has to do with that language she developed once she, uh, misplaced her tongue.” The man smiled, his thick lips twisting grotesquely, and pulled the cover off of a microphone on the counter. “She speaks into this instrument with that ooonga-oooonga talk—you’ve heard how she speaks? It’s a language based on tone levels and changes in pitch. Think of it as a language that climbs up and down stairways, while ours remains on the ground. Vertical, as opposed to horizontal.”

Londi stared blankly, but he continued, “Loo’s language is much more suited to binary logic, which is how these machines think. When I command the thinker boxes, the computers, it takes me twenty times the effort.”

Londi shook her head, understanding little of the explanation. “I suppose there’s a reason you’ve shown us?”

“Oh, you killed one of my Transport men, and while doing that blundered into the center of Government. You are bright and strong, and you are either an asset to me or a danger. Mmm, now. You owe me a body.” He scratched at his belly. “You will either work with me and, humph, join the gene pool, or you will die. Either way, you will never leave our community. You see that, don’t you? That you owe me a body—one way or another?”

“Not much of a choice.”

“Then in the spirit of cooperation, you will tell me about your friends.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“The friends you spoke of earlier. Knights, you called them, using chess terminology. Yes, I was aware of them. But they can’t know you are here, can they? They must think you are at Blue Hole. They will be captured there—easily. It’s not only my largest prison camp, but also a training ground for Security. I like to have them refine their, uh, interviewing techniques on the prisoners.”

Londi was at a loss. She had mentioned companions as a bluff, and now she was told that someone actually seemed to be on the follow. But then she had a wry thought: There was one bastard’s name she didn’t mind giving.

“It’s probably Anton Takk.”

Loo groaned, disappointed. Londi turned and saw that the little woman had her razorlike flier’s knife in hand.

“She’s buggered,” said the large man. “We already knew the answer. And if you lied, I had promised Loo she could have a little nick of your tongue. Let’s hope you continue to cooperate. Or you might have to learn Loo’s language.

“You see, we take visitors from the outside quite seriously. No one must know where we are. If the location of this canyon became known all across Merqua, we would have to move immediately. And I hate moving—every forty or fifty years is often enough.” He sighed. “And now I’ve got the thinker boxes—a whole cavern full of thinker boxes, which would not be a simple thing to transport surreptitiously.”

The Monitor’s jaw muscles bulged nervously. “If I had to move now because of your friends, I would get quite upset,” he said sternly.

Londi felt queasy, and as her vision began to blur, she heard Diego’s hoofs clatter nervously. She put a hand on the desk for support. Anton Takk. That Northland rube—out here? Oh, bugger. “Yeah I’ll, uh, cooperate. Course I will.”

“Yes,” he responded, suddenly cheerful. “And now shall we entertain ourselves with a real game of chess? Did you know that even the ancients considered it an ancient game—it’s that old? They say that there are two things that not even the firebombs can eradicate: Mankind and chess. We do like to keep killing each other, don’t we?”

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“…And then Pec-Pec, the son of god Rutherford Cross, came among us weeping. He gave us knowledge where we had little, he gave us children where few could be born, he gave the unending life to those who would be Three As One, The Wise. And as he gave these gifts he then took away as well. He forbade that ever the children of Rutherford Cross should use the tools by which explosion may tear at flesh…”

—From the writings of Ligkh Priest Lit Mannah,—2UH3.

“The dragon fish seems to be confined to his bowl. Words seem trapped in a closed book. Love seems to dangle between your legs.” He rethought the last point and grimaced. “Well, none of these things are captive.”

There was no response.

“I will try to explain it again. In another way. Look at my hands—I am steering the truck just fine, around the boulders and craters. My feet hit the brakes at the right time. We’d be dead if they didn’t. So that is one state of existence. I am driving across the prairie.

“Yet I also am talking with you—I am trying to make you understand that we will not go to Blue Hole. Scream, scream, scream, go ahead, boogie. We must go to a canyon south of there. That is a second state of existence. I communicate with you, and that has nothing to do with bouncing across these hills. I can do both of these things at once. It is as if I have two minds, or I am in two places at once—or, if I were a much stronger person, that I actually were in all places at all times.

“But I am not this powerful person. If the driving here gets very difficult, if there is rain and I cannot see well, or if … Oh! Sorry! … if there are many more craters like that one, then I must give more of myself to the driving and less of myself to our conversation.

“And so it is somewhat in the same way that while I sit beside our camp fire I can also be, uh, sharing ideas with a man who is many miles away. To reach that man, to enter his mind, takes very hard work. So while I am also sitting beside the fire, I cannot do so much—it is best to close the eyes and not move. This makes me dangerously hurtable, as you found out, but these are the risks.

“It was hard work, meeting with this man—entering his mind. You talk about how badly you feel about what happens to people you meet, particularly people you love. Well, this man—this man whose mind I entered—I have not love for him at all. He does harm to many people, and had terrible things planned for you. Still, I do not think that he deserved what I fear I have done to him.

“We must live by certain good ways or—who knows?—we could destroy civilization. The way … the way an angry child tears apart a book. Anton, there are things we cannot even wish on our own…. Anton, are you listening? Are you awake?”

That afternoon Anton Takk dreamt that he could fly.

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Tha’Enton was beginning to think he had exhausted the musical possibilities of riding on top of a metal beast, the van. His music here started, as always, with sounds provided by the environment—the constant whine of the engine and the whooring of wind in his flared nostrils. There was the less rhythmic crunch and scratch of tires against gravel and the clattering jeep following behind, and to this he added his own mallets pounding against the van top (his practice mallets—not the fine performance pieces he used on the ban-ott drums).

As the van angled northwest across the Redlands, Tha’Enton had grown fond of sitting cross-legged, facing forward, near the front of the van. Musically, it was a strategic position: Within easy reach were the low tones of the center of the roof behind him, the tight and tinny throppings afforded by the edge where the metal skin wrapped over the roof supports, and the tick-tick of the windshield.

He bokked the windshield only sparingly, but with great relish, for the surprise of it seemed to drive the gray-head at the wheel gullybonkers.

But for a musician used to the infinite permutations made possible by the Pa and its 718 pairs of bones, the van-top soundings had grown boring. Tha’Enton could easily fall into spells of silence as he scanned the scorched badlands, mentally hunting jack deer, those antlered, sheep-sized rabbits crouching in the scrub. He would spot one of the cowering creatures, gauge the van speed and distance, then imagine flinging a tosser disk.

It was during such a meditation that they topped a hill in the red desert and the roadblock, such as it was, came into view. A government jeep had been pulled across the highway and a lone figure stood at its side. Curiously, any vehicle could have detoured the obstruction by a mile on either side—if the driver were willing to risk the caugi cacti puncturing the tires.