The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (2 page)

“Murder?” he said, smirking again. “More precisely, it was a manslaughter. There was a large brawl, the report says. The only known participant was Nora Londi, identified by a Badger because of her unique stature. And there was a dead man, a drunk with a cracked skull. One … dead man.”

“Oh. Maybe she didn’t kill him,” I said, and I was starting to see the mistake. Ag.

“She was involved. And therefore guilty.”

“I withdraw the complaint.”

“A fart in the wind!” He fluttered his hands at imagined vapors. “She doesn’t belong in free camp. Besides, she’s gone, shipped off in the same carrier she arrived in.”

And we argued on like that and I missed mess call. It did me no good, of course. He had the Book and I didn’t. He was the Government and, despite what they say, I wasn’t.

So you can see the impossible task, and the help I need from outside. Maps of all Sectors of Merqua would be of great use. And money.

And please locate Nora Londi. Tell her my story. I console myself that anyone might have filed the complaint I did—although none so powerfully as her husband-to-be. I have little practice at emotions, so I am not sure what more to say. Just tell her that I am coming.

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“All right, all right. Case number zero-zero-two-three-CB. Twenty-three! What is this place CB that we’ve had just a twenty-three-history on?” Rosenthal Webb fired out the question in clippy, impatient syllables. He drummed the four finger nubs of his right hand on the polished wood of the conference table.

“Camp Blade.”

“Hooo, yes. Camp Blade, by plumb.” He should have known, and in a way he did know: The code designations for every Government station, thousands of them, were buried deep in his thought muddle, under the bric-a-brac of twenty years of administrative duties he had performed since his initial training and fieldwork. Now his hair was falling out and his memory was fraying. This didn’t feel like a Revolution anymore.

“Sir,” ventured Virginia Quale, “Camp Blade is a Northland settlement of approximately—”

Webb clapped his open hand onto the desktop: “A settlement of approximately one thousand—well, maybe fifteen hunnerd by now—people stationed for the purpose of logging and north-post security. It’s considered contamination free, relatively speaking, and thus an asset to the gene pool. How am I doing?”

There were seven polite nods around the table. “On the mark, Mr. Webb,” said Quale. “We estimate the population well over the old thousand count now, and as for the twenty-three-history, well, from a percentage standpoint, twenty-three cases since we have been keeping records is quite in line with a population that small.”

“And this poor piss-plumb number twenty-three,” said Webb, flipping a page of the report in front of him, “is a Mr. Anton Takk, we assume, although his dispatch is unsigned. He’s a Supply-houser … um-hmmm. A reader, of course, and a writer.” Webb turned another page as he skimmed. “Apparently considering—and this is months ago—going AWOL. We’ve got some poor plum-sucker in the frozen north who’s taken to the old Supply line communique route.”

Winston Weet interjected from the far end of the table: “He mentions an axe-blade dispatch. It could have been one of mine, for all I know—we quit those sixteen years ago. Some ‘em are probably still rotting in the warehouses.”

Webb sucked at his lower lip. “In any case,” he said, “we have a reader using a discredited form of communication unknowingly. There’s at least a fifty-percent chance that he has announced himself to the Government. Hah. If so, maybe the Monitor will promote him—for taking special initiative for self-education.”

“And maybe,” responded Quale, “he’ll eat him for brekkie.”

“Just how much of this letter can we believe?” asked Weet. His fingers repeatedly fripped across the corner of his copy.

Quale seemed surprised by the question. “How much? Why would he lie? He’s taking such a chance with the Government in just what he says that they’d surely send him to Blue Hole. And even if the story were mostly balderdash—this ‘pile of rocks’ named Nora and all of that—it’s obvious that there’s a man about to bolt from Camp Blade without the least bit of outside experience. He grew up in a logger camp!”

“I’ve had a little experience with reworking the truth myself,” Weet replied. “But I agree. Something is about to happen that we ought to be on top of.”

“In any case,” Webb said wearily, “I suppose we should try to get to him—preferably before the Government does.” There were seven somber nods.

Quale’s throat rattled. “My word. A lifetime in this, and we still have not a glint where to find it—the Government, the Monitor.” She stared down at Webb’s mangled hand. “And don’t forget,” she told the aging revolutionary, “we are a service organization now. The Lynchburg Doctrine still holds. We quietly help the like-minded. Quietly. For this, no bombs. None of those whip traps you buy from that sadist. No one need die. Unless we locate the Monitor himself….”

Webb groaned. “I know I’ve said this a dozen. But again I have that much, a glint. Not of where he is, but how to find him.”

Weet sighed. “A new strategy?”

“A new friend.”

Quale rapped the edge of the conference table impatiently. “Rosenthal, we can only authorize a quiet, limited mission—to find Anton Takk and offer him aid or hiding among us.”

“The Lynchburg Doctrine—” Webb stopped himself. The words had come out too angrily. He breathed deeply and started again. “I consider the Lynchburg Doctrine, as you all know, to be a tragic mistake—we sit here in a hole like a hutch of shivering rabbits. The Monitor found our Lynchburg Station by paid informant, and we can be fairly certain such a massacre will not be repeated here. We are becoming precisely what the Monitor wants—a chess club in hiding.”

Virginia Quale raised her right hand. She paused during the silence that the gesture afforded, waiting for diplomatic words to come to her. “The Revolution, as you once fought it, is over. We can’t have you tossing hand bombs willy-nilly on the simplest of missions. Let’s put it to a vote.” Quale had studied the other faces around the table, and already knew she would win.

Rosenthal Webb pushed through the outer hatch and stepped into a snow-blanketed forest on a mountainside. The white thermasuit and snow boots made him invisible on the landscape. The last daylight had vanished an hour ago. The snow was falling fast and wet, and Webb watched its angle to gauge the wind. The path to the mountaintop had disappeared in the new coverage, but he knew the way well from his nightly ritual.

At the treeless top the visibility was low, but he could still make out the long purple spines of sister mountains all around. He remembered the old name, Blue Ridge. Webb dipped a hand into the snow, felt for the canvas tarp, and pulled it back, baring a thirty-foot panel of camouflaged wood, which was reinforced with steel strapping. He opened the three combination locks, heaved the wood covering aside, and drew out a hand-cranked winch, which he bolted in place on the lip of the box. The handle turned easily, clicking steadily as an eight-bladed windmill, spanning twenty-eight feet, rose above ground. The facing of the blades’ brass hub was imprinted with a circle of lettering: CRED FAIGING. Webb stopped once to release the gear lock, allowing the blades to teeter and then pinwheel methodically in the wet night breeze. Deep in the mountain a generator hummed and massive batteries charged.

The whirling blades always revived memories of airplane propellers; Webb had actually seen one of the ancient birds fly once, three or four decades ago, a carnival curiosity patched together by some crackpot on the coastal dunes.

Those were wild days. The Monitor was more a rumor than a ruler, he seemed to remember. A younger could hitch the old highways from New Chicago to the coast on a whim—even take hack from Government trucks if he had centimes to spread around or a bottle to share. But the bunkhouse riots of New Chicago changed all that, and the Monitor’s brutal Security force was born. The righteous men and women, who had gleefully flung petrobombs in the streets one day, had gone scrambling for the wilderness the next.

Oh, these benign, rolling mountains had been so welcoming. Such a green and gentle refuge from which to administer a young person’s Revolution.

When the windmill was fully extended, Webb rested. This was one of his few remaining physical chores, and he clung to it steadfastly. No, there was no more Revolution, just this damned “un-Government” to nurse along, quietly, discreetly, once in a while a clandestine mission to set in motion. “Revolution” meant raiding armories, didn’t it? And blowing bridges and stringing up a Badger or two from a lamppost in New Chicago? He regarded the half-fingers of his right hand. He coughed, spat into the snow, and wondered what evil was rumbling down in his lungs. There was no red in the phlegm. Not today, anyway.

Webb turned north. There were four more windmills to set up.

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A simple steel device was affixed to the back of Nora Londi’s neck with a leather collar, and she thought about it often as she trudged down, down, down. She had not seen it since it had been padlocked there five days before, but she retained an indelible image of its every mean contour. Its spring-loaded power reminded her of a bear trap: Metal muscles were persistently tensed, ready to drive a thick needle into her spinal cord at the flip of a trigger. A snap collar. Tied to that trigger was a ten-foot leather thong, grasped on the other end by the sweat-moist palm of Red Boss.

It was the second day of their descent. Ironically, it seemed to the flatlander Londi, the downhill hike was hard work, every step a braking action to prevent a dangerous, headlong run down the rocky path. Red Boss belched out a hoof with every heavy footfall, and each jostle threw the mighty weight of his belly onto his strained canvas-weave belt. His sopping flannel shirt bore the red badge, a horizontal rectangle, of a Sector 4 Transport official. Behind him, the haughty pack llamas followed, murmuring. If Londi fell, she wondered, would Red Boss let go of the trigger thong? Could he react fast enough? And how sensitive was the trigger?

The vegetation was getting jungly, and insects, horseflies mostly, whirred incessantly. Londi was losing the distinction between her own body odor and the smell of the rich earth. Her brown felt hat, a constant companion for six years, was developing a band of crusty, white salt deposits from her perspiration. Somewhere far below, inviting and invisible through the forest, was the steady, roaring River 074. Londi battled the temptation to ask for a sip from Red Boss’s canteen, wary of what brutal form of recreation he might invent during a trailside pause. She badly wanted to wash the taste of Red Boss from her mouth, or at least drown trying. Death was sounding not too bad.

Red Boss had found exquisite pleasure in clamping the collar onto her neck. “You my dawg now, honey,” he had said, stroking her hair outside the holding cells of a town, really a rubble field, called Denver. “You my sweet little dawg for the next ten days. You like diggin’ with those paws of yours? Good—you gonna be a miner now. I’m gonna take you to your new home. Say ‘woof,’ honey, say ‘woof.’”

Denver was pretty much the edge of civilization, and not a particularly civil one at that. It was populated mostly by salvagers, a dusty and sore-speckled lot who had no qualms about delving through irradiated wastelands for ancient treasures. There were riches to be found in places where the Government would not go. Beyond Denver there was nothing, save a prison-mining outpost somewhere among those black peaks that rose like a curtain along the prairie.

From Denver they had driven southwest as far as the old highways would take them, Red Boss at the wheel of a dilapidated jeep, Londi manacled to the passenger seat. Then the auto’s four-wheel-drive came into play on a series of mountain trails, creek beds, and deteriorating macadam roads. Red Boss knew the way well and never consulted a map.

They had abandoned the jeep the day before, and now the sunlight, blocked by the high ridge behind them, began to fail in midafternoon. The steamy air seemed to press at Londi’s eyelids, blurring her vision, and fatigue sent her staggering alarmingly often. Once Londi caught a glimpse of shadowy treetops below and thought she saw a human perched in a cliff-clinging spruce. The figure sprouted huge wings and glided into space. An eagle, perhaps. One of the llamas, as if in awe of the sight, gurgled, “Hoooooorrh.”

That night, Nora Londi’s shackle chain was wrapped around the trunk of a long-leafed pine. Her hat lay at her side, tired looking. Insects visited it happily. When Red Boss seemed hypnotized by the camp fire, she pulled at the chain silently and hard, positioning her wrists flat against the steel cuffs to prevent cuts. But the tree bark, it seemed, was the only thing sustaining any damage.

The deadly collar was still in place, the leather trigger thong ending near Red Boss’s bedroll. Beyond that the five llamas drowsed, unburdened for a few hours. Still strapped to the largest llama, a 410-pounder named Diego, was a semiautomatic rifle in its leather holster.

“Whadda ya doin’?”

“My evening exercises, Bossman. Isometrics, y’know.”

“That chain ain’t gonna give, no way, honey. And them cufflocks is solid Masters. I been doin’ this too long to get chancerous with prisoners.” His red beard ended in a ragged point, which bobbed comically when he spoke. Londi wondered if it had ever caught fire.

“Gotta keep my arm muscles up, ready for that mining, Bossman. Could get flabby just workin’ my legs like this.”

“Couple more days on the trail, honey, then it’s twenty years in a hole—pick swingin’, timber haulin’. All the arm work you want. But maybe you’d feel better walking the rest of the way there on all-fours. Hah. Like a dawg!”

Londi leaned back against the pine and closed her eyes. The bark crackled softly against her skull. Her mind wandered to the rowdy, urine-scented streets of New Chicago, then to a guy she had met in some godforsaken Northland logging region—what Sector was that? Anton Takk was the fellow’s name, the bastard. Next she imagined a flock of human-size birds circling in the cool dark above the treetops.