The Dream Vessel (12 page)

The catamaran’s twin pontoons were running low in the water, and Tym cursed at the craft’s sluggish response as she tacked toward the inlet.

She had thought old Sey-Waage was napping there in the webbing, his eyes closed, his graying beard poking skyward like the tuft of some drab jungle bird. But the old Healer was chuckling now, a sound something like creaking deck wood—only the catamaran had no deck.

“If all goes well,” Sey-Waage said, “we will be lighter than a water spider on our way out. If this Fungus Person shares our wisdom.”

“And if he does not?”

Again the creaking laugh. “Then perhaps you and I will share him for dinner.”

Tym smiled. Cannibalism was somewhat rare these days among the islanders, but the practice always showed a resurgence during desperate times. It was amusing to contemplate—the insult of consuming one’s enemy. In a way, that was easier to accept than what they were actually about to do: Ask an enemy for assistance.

Tym checked that her knives were still snug in her thigh straps and the tosser disks were sheathed in the leather pocket stitched to her G-string. She let out the rope tethered to the corner of the blue-gray expanse of sail, colored to blend with the morning’s first light. She corrected the rudder and grimaced at the clumsy rush of water twelve inches below her bent knees.

This little sea fly should barely touch water, she told herself. But look at it drag.

To enter the cove, the catamaran had to round a spear-point of beach, and as they did so Sey-Waage flicked his right hand and clapped his pointing fingers together. “Ah, there,” he said.

Tym looked at the elder, puzzled that his eyes still seemed to be closed, and followed the line of his bony fingers into the underbrush. A Fungus Person stood in the shadows with a rifle, his face smudged dark green in a pathetic attempt at camouflage. She drew a disk from the sheath and cupped it in her right hand as a precaution. She judged the throw to be seventy-five feet—even moving, she probably could thok his throat out; undoubtedly strike his chest. Unless he sights with the rifle, she decided, she would do nothing.

The catamaran rounded the point without a shot fired or a disk flung. Beyond, in the center of the south-facing beach, another Fungus Person stood at the end of a low dock, its wood weathered to gray. An old dory was lashed to the dock, apparently belonging to the thirty-foot skimmer anchored a dozen yards out, a bulky, unremarkable craft. Perfect, in its unassuming appearance, for a black marketeer.

The man wore high black boots, faded denim trousers and a billowy white blouse. His face was sun-reddened, the eyes surrounded by a permanent web of wrinkles.

The man propped a rifle against one knee, an automatic, Tym guessed—the kind fed by a rounded clip. The sight of its vile steel made Tym sick. She had seen many, always in the hands of Fungus People who did not mean well. Her tosser disk was still very much ready.

Tym threw him a dock line, and although it had a satisfactory loop on the end, the stranger tied it in a square knot around a piling. This made Tym even more uneasy, but if a quick escape were necessary, she would just whack the rope.

The Fungus Person motioned them up onto the dock and said something in the tongue that sounds like barking dogs. When they returned blank stares, the stranger fumbled with the Rafer language: “The man who sells your people’s, uh, ganja to me said that you would come.” It seemed to hurt his lips to make understandable sounds.

Up beyond the trees, Tym could see a wooden shelter on stilts. Fungus People seemed to abhor even harmless forest animals as much as Rafers detested the banger weapons.

The man flashed a quick, ceremonial smile and pulled the clip out of his rifle. “I know that your people do not like guns,” he said, “that having one here might be an insult. But I must take, uh, precautions.”

Sey-Waage was still scanning the woods. “We also know that this is not the only banger among us,” the old man replied.

The Fungus Man shrugged. “My name is Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jones,” he said politely. “Your people prefer to call me Delano, as it is a sound most at home with your way of speaking. It is an honor to be visited by a Rafer elder, and I hope that the guns do not offend too much. So. Why have you come?”

“We want a ship,” Tym blurted, and Sey-Waage winced that she would be so undiplomatic as to get to the point right away. “We want a skimmer faster than any in these waters,” she added.

Delano pointed with his chin. “That little two-stick you’re sailing—they’ve done Rafers nicely for centuries.”

“And there are many among us,” Sey-Waage said, “that would say we should not attempt anything more—that to build larger, to embrace the complexity, the technology, would be sacrilegious.” The elder grinned and scratched absently at his bare chest. “I am not among them, of course. I am of the opinion that if our people are to survive among the islands, we must have skimmers that will outrun and outmaneuver Big Tom.”

Delano hoisted his right leg and planted his foot atop the piling where he had tied the catamaran. Tym backed away casually, wanting to put distance between herself and Sey-Waage in case a fight started. The Fungus Person was starting to sound surprisingly fluent in the civilized tongue, and she could not shake the feeling that something was wrong.

“Hoo. To hammer up a proper skimmer—hunnerd, two hunnerd feet?—well, timbers like that just aren’t grown on these islands,” Delano said. He was directing his comments at Sey-Waage, which further irritated Tym. “And the wood whits for it….”

“If we must build the skimmer we want, the Rafers will learn to do the work,” the elder said. “We have specific capabilities and design requirements with which you may not be familiar. But to obtain the knowledge for the building of these larger vessels, to obtain the timbers and hardware that we would need from the mainland—that would take a Fungus Person, one who knows trading, one who is not particularly allegiant to the wishes of the mainland Government. That, Delano, would be a person such as you.”

Delano laughed and tossed his ammo clip up in the air and caught it again. “I appreciate your directness,” he said. “You don’t skin a pig with a penknife, do you?”

Sey-Waage nodded.

“But it wouldn’t be news to you,” Delano said, “that I do frequent business with Big Tom, a powerful man who would not be amused to have such a skimmer whisking around the islands if he didn’t own it. What makes you think I wouldn’t tell him that the red-leggers were building a ship like that?”

Tym’s eyes had squinted almost closed and her words quivered with mounting fury. “Red-leggers, Delano, are runners from the mainland. Or they used to be, until Big Tom decided his flesh harvest wasn’t big enough and started to take islanders, too. Red-leggers….”

“Tym. Tym.” Sey-Waage was wagging his pointing fingers at the catamaran, uneasy with this angry talk. “Just show him.”

Tym sighed and leapt onto their skimmer’s near pontoon. She slid back the cover to the storage hold and removed a gold brick, which she thumped onto the dock. “This is how we will pay,” she said. She unloaded the gold bars from alternating sides of the boat, maintaining balance to keep it from flipping. When she was done there were ten bars in a neat row at Delano’s feet.

The Fungus Person’s eyes were wide. “I…heard…a rumor that….”

“Yes,” Sey-Waage broke in. “The gold was Big Tom’s. The reason that you will not tell Big Tom about our desire for a skimmer faster than his fleet is simple. You will take a share of gold in return for helping us build the kind of skimmer that we desire, and for training our people. And Big Tom is the last person you would tell about it. I suspect he still considers the gold to be his, no?”

Delano was nodding rapidly. “He’d rip my gizzard out with his teeth to get it back. Wouldn’t matter how I came by it.”

Billister carried with him guilt, many forms of it.

As he worked the tobacco field, he tried to think back to his youth. Even just to two months before, for that matter. Hadn’t he known? Hadn’t the solemn parade of red-leggers, tens of thousands of them, marched directly under his upturned nose? He had been aware of something, that something was out of kilter in his pampered upbringing on Thomas Island.

He hunched in the steamy field with the other red-leggers, a chain rattling between his ankles each time he stepped to a new tobacco plant. The farm supervisors, “Ag Agency superintendents,” had taught him how to sweep his hand around the stalk and tear a cluster of leaves away without damaging the entire plant. They had not taught him how to do this without damaging his back muscles.

The arrangement was that if he worked Ag duty for five years without incident, he might become eligible for a better assignment. They spoke dreamily of the indoor jobs available in Supply and Transport. They pointed to themselves, former field workers, they claimed.

But even aside from the work, it was a ghastly, regimented life. Meals of overstewed vegetables, with the rare shred of pork. No news sheets, books, or anything written—much better to pretend to be illiterate. Into bed, and up again, as the wailing sirens dictated.

Billister was not sure any human would last five years.

Priming tobacco, this was called. He and many people of his own race were primers, up to their elbows in gluelike tobacco juice. In the heat-warped distance the barbed wire fences stood sentry.

Billister was regarded with suspicion even by fellow Rafers. Occasionally he pronounced words oddly, words in his own native language. He had that manner about him—too gentlemanly, almost effeminate. His skin was soft from a protected life, and on the first day anyone had seen him—on the day of loading on Thomas Island—his fellow red-leggers had actually detected perfume, one of the incomprehensible products of the Fungus People. And he had appeared clean shaven, head and chin!

Those field workers who knew a touch of English made a play on his name—Blister, they called him, after his first day of picking. Who was this soft stranger?

If they only knew, Billister thought—thwack, he tore away a handful of tobacco leaves—they would remove my limbs just like that. He handed his shoulder bag of leaves to a field runner, who laid them on the portable conveyor belt that followed the primers up and down the rows. There the stems of the leaves were bunched around a stick and then run through a gasoline-powered stitching machine. Later, the racks of leaves were piled onto a cart and wheeled over to the curing barns to be hung.

An Ag Agency pickup truck rumbled down the dirt road between the pines and the field. It skidded to a stop at the point nearest to the primers. The red dust cloud, momentum-borne, drifted over and past the truck like a tidal wave. Odd.

Billister turned to look, wiping his face on his shoulder (he had quickly learned not to use his gooey forearms). A supervisor jabbed him in the side with the butt of his snub gun, and Billister doubled over, near vomiting, remembering the day he arrived on the mainland—the man chained in front of him trying to speak, punched in the kidney. The crisp pain produced a hallucination: the red earth between the tobacco stalks superimposed over lips of the young man who had tried to speak to him. Moving lips, trying to say what?

Weakly, Billister grabbed a few leaves, a poor effort. But the supervisor, wearing the gray cotton uniform and a straw hat, seemed satisfied.

Three men hopped out of the truck. They were not Ag Agency. They wore loose jump suits, swung rifles at their sides irreverently, and had wide utility belts slung around their hips, hung with hardware like Billister had never seen.

Billister decided he would keep his head down, stealing a glance only when his bag was full again and he had to stand erect to deliver his pickings to the field runner. There were two supervisors in this field and fifteen red-leggers—ten primers, three runners, and two operating the stitching machinery. The supervisors were talking with the new arrivals in low tones. A cigarette pack came out and they all lit up.

Eventually, the supervisors were led back to the pickup truck, looking bewildered. The oldest of the jump-suited men walked authoritatively to the stitching machine, studied its controls, and shut it off. Suddenly the field was ringing with silence. For the first time, the primers’ feet could be heard whispering across the earth.

“English!” the jump-suited man shouted. “Do any of you speak English?”

The workers stared, motionless. Billister hesitated, but decided the other red-leggers already had a low opinion of him—he might as well cooperate with the Fungus Person. “Here.” He raised a gum-covered arm.

The man trotted over. His shaven face was tanned, sweating, and there was a scar on the tip of his nose. His head seemed small for his body size, and a cigarette dangled from his lips, dead center. Crescent moons of moisture had formed under his arms.

“Hallo, the name’s Fel Guinness,” the stranger said. “Those two men, are they workers?” It was an odd accent. The man’s breath smelled of ale.

“Workers?” Billister found the question peculiar. Obviously they were workers. One man had been shoving the bulky machinery down the rows on its rubber wheels while the second man aligned the leaves properly on their hanging sticks.

“What I mean is, are they supervisors like those two”—he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder—“or are they workers? Red-leggers. Laborers not here by choice.”

“Ah,” said Billister, feeling faint from the pounding he had taken a few minutes before. “The rest of us are, uh, workers. Yes. All of us.”

The man raised his voice to a shout: “Then you will all please proceed to the barn.” He pointed to the wood-frame structure a half mile away, down the dirt road at the edge of the field. Then the man about-faced and trotted back to his truck.

None of the red-leggers moved. Then Billister remembered, and shouted the instructions in Rafer.

The business at the curing barn went quickly. When Billister and his fellow field workers filed into the dim enclosure, the two supervisors stood in the center of the room. Their mouths were gagged, their hands bound behind them. Two ropes were looped on the end, fitted around their necks, and the other ends tossed over a high rafter, up where the racks of tobacco were, dripping moisture onto the crowd of curious observers.

Then Fel Guinness’s younger assistants hoisted the supervisors three feet off the ground. Billister watched them kicking, pumping silently save for the dry rustle of gray cotton, the scuffing of leather, and the creak of rope.

The field workers were speechless. Guinness was smiling, sucking his cigarette down to a butt. He laid an arm around Billister’s shoulder, saying, “Tell them we are from the new Government. Tell them that they are free. That we will take them into town now where we will feed them properly, until they decide how they will spend the rest of their lives.”

Billister turned to the gaunt, distrusting faces in the low light and wondered how to explain the ways of the Fungus People.