The Dream Vessel (13 page)

Grandfather had been the one who claimed to fly. He had put the youngster Tommie on his lap (the nickname Big Tom came later, with his ample belly) and angled his open hand into a beach wind flecked with spray and sand. He explained there on the wind-creaking deck how a ton of steel could rise off the ground under its own power.

But Grandfather also told him the story about Jagger and the Beanstalk. And that men had walked on the moon. Hoo.

So Grandfather, the daft, old man with legs bowed and vibrating, told the youngster how he had climbed into a canvas and bamboo carriage with a twirling shaft on its nose, and had crashed the contraption into the welcoming swells of the Big Ocean.

Grandfather let on, the breeze tugging at his scrappy tufts of hair, that his very experiments had brought the Monitor to decree that flight by humans was impossible. And, furthermore, illegal. Humankind could not benefit by flight out over the unknown waters.

Big Tom spent his childhood ship-baiting on these narrow islands running parallel to the mainland coast. The Outre Banks. As the youngest male of the family it became his ten o’clock chore, just before bedtime, to hang a lantern from a mule’s neck, and lead the beast up and down the beachside dunes.

In the dark chill of early next morning, he would find a baffled and bedraggled wet captain in the kitchen regaling the adults of the family with the story of a ghostly, bobbing buoy that had signaled safe harbor to his ship when there was none. Of course, come daylight the unfortunate captain’s beached skimmer would be found—picked clean even of its brass fittings.

Father and Grandfather would be quite demonstrative in their outrage at the seaman’s misfortune, tossing fistfuls of sand and cursing to the rising sun. Then they would sell the soggy captain some rotting sculler, and he would make his way homeward with tales of the killer ghosts of the sand dunes on the appropriately named Outre Banks. Once, they even sold a captain his own lifeboat, freshly repainted.

Big Tom had worked the mule trick for his family two years before he realized he should demand a share of the booty. He immediately began to collect a small percentage of the spoils—sure, why hadn’t he asked before, Grandfather wanted to know. And with that, Big Tom took his first step into adulthood. The misty fantasy of childhood began to fade, and it was perhaps coincidental that at about that time he saw his first Government man.

Grandfather had been hearing tall tales about the Monitor since his own childhood, so the bull-faced, three-headed ruler already would have been impossibly old by the time Big Tom was a professional boat-baiter. This age business led Big Tom, in his maturing wisdom, to conclude that the famously secretive and paranoid Monitor was actually a succession of furtive rulers, perhaps a family dynasty not unlike his band of Outre Banks scalawags.

The Government man arrived in a little borrowed sailboat he had awkwardly tacked across the inner sound from the mainland. McTaggart was his name. He was a smooth talker, pasty-faced, thirty-five or so. His eyes glowed with the fire of a true believer as he preached of the imminent arrival of order in the outlands, as he called them. The frontier. There was a bustling new capital in the middle lands, New Chicago. There was commerce. Defense and security. Work assignments for all.

(This was old news to Grandfather, who grumbled that New Chicago was supposed to be a pitiful crosshatch of mud ruts. But nothing about the Government had pleased Grandfather since it declared that flight was impossible a couple of decades before.)

The Government man made vague references to the pirates who would no longer terrorize such innocents as the inhabitants of this little coastal fishing community—that was how they subsisted, wasn’t it—fishing? Grandfather nodded yes, uneasy as the Government man scratched notes into a little book.

And then the emissary McTaggart wobbled back into his sailboat and floated away. No other Government men were seen for three or four years.

They did see, however, an increasing traffic of drifters—the first of them mere malcontents uncomfortable with the growing influence of Government where once there was a robust survival-by-wit. Many of them bought boats, any old dory that would carry their bobbing souls a few miles down the coast. As the fleeing men and women grew more desperate over the years, heartier craft were in demand. As a young adult, Big Tom took to designing and building twenty-and thirty-foot skimmers—quickly and roughly pounded together—and selling them at outrageously inflated prices.

In the year that Grandfather died McTaggart returned, and Big Tom was glad that the old man was not around to see this. A large chunk of coastland, including the Outre Banks, were now part of Government District Eight; with McTaggart its governor—actually, the only lawman at all.

McTaggart was going gray now, earlier than most, his face eaten by the sun and an inch-long scar curving up the right side of his lip, bitten there by a panicking runner. He arrived in an odd contraption, a boat twenty feet long but without mast or sail. At the stern there chugged an engine, mechanically related to those in the land-autos that were now grinding up the trails of the mainland, it was said.

The Government man lifted the lid of the engine for Big Tom to see the inner workings of “the little whore-banger,” as he called it. Big Tom grunted admiration. McTaggart said that there would be no engines licensed for civilian boats. And Big Tom agreed that that would be a good thing. Privately, he envied the potential of the throbbing machine, but he began to see rather clearly how Big Bang Day had come about.

Big Tom had begun to carry a hip flask, a flat silverplated number bartered away by a well-heeled desperado. He and McTaggart traded nips there on the sound-side dock and the Government man used his loosened jaw, eventually, to complain about the frustrations of overseeing an outland territory, one more populated by people fleeing the Government than loyal to it.

Big Tom harumphed a few sympathetic sounds, passed the bourbon a few more times, and almost mortally gagged when McTaggart told him: “I know this, that ya sells sea craft to the disloyals.”

“Ho, now….”

“Awww, hold on. You’re a solid, longtime local. An’ by the way, sorry to hear of the old man.”

“He didn’t care much fer the Gumment, ta be honest.”

“Like I say,” McTaggart continued, “I’m not in a choicey situation, our sector being in its infant stages. But the Monitor says that part of the mandate of the outland governors is to stop the runners. Grab ’em, ship ’em back for labor assignments.”

“Hmmph.”

“And I have no security force as yet, but a budget for bounties.”

“Ah,” the young Big Tom said, imagining the body of Grandfather just now being sheet-wrapped to a slab of slate that would carry him to the ocean floor. “And just how much would that bounty be?”

Captain Alfred Jerome-Paul sucked at his coffee, brain-numb, hoping that Churchill the cook was keeping a proper check of the supplies being loaded on. Those three rousers he had met last night were now edging up the gangplank, nudging their way past the docksmen who shouldered sacks of flour and potatoes. The three of them looked as ragged and blood-eyed as the captain felt.

The captain blew his nose on a blue bandanna and tucked it into the back of his trousers, letting it trail out over his belt. Cold coming on, mayhap.

Last night. Captain Jerome-Paul had fully intended to make an early night of it, just one dip of the wick at Madame Augusta’s Trug House, Portland’s safest and most genteel establishment on the Blain Street red-light row. Just one poke. Maybe a pop of rye. And he would dog back to his tidy aft cabin for a nightcap and then plenty of bunk time.

That had been the plan. And as often happened when Captain Jerome-Paul hit the streets for a pop and a poke, it turned into many pops and many pokes, all up and down Blain Street until well past three A.M. It amazed him that he awoke this morning in his own bunk. His head throbbed, his wallet was thin, and his pecker burned like a fireplace poker. How he managed to get back to the ship he would never know—unless these three youngers slogging up the gangplank had the story.

He slurped at the coffee again, forcing it down too hot and scorching his esophagus. Too old for this, he thought. Time to give it up to the likes of these boys. The three youngers boarded, each of them swinging a duffel, and the captain resurrected a dim memory that they had talked him into an illicit lift down the coast—for a sizeable fee.

Captain Jerome-Paul had observed that these three were rather free with the centimes from the moment they had met at Madame Augusta’s. The talky one, who seemed to be the group leader, had been buying a stream of those weak house cocktails for the ebony-haired trug Bestilla (the captain’s favorite—and there was a minor sting of jealousy here). The other two were singers, in a loose sense, a bastard’s howling opera. They took their trugs two at a time, returned to the center lounge to tell all about it, then took two more back for another roll.

If it was possible to bust manners at Madame Augusta’s, these three had done it.

And now, this morning, the captain had rolled out of his bunk, squinting painfully even in first light, and ordered the dockside craneman to load the last of his cargo—the shipbuilding timbers he would off-load at first port, Norfolk.

The talky stranger—the captain remembered his name to be something like Dolan…no, Delano—dropped his duffel to the boards. He approached the captain in sure and careful steps, a thumb hitched in his drawstring as if he had a tired putter down there that needed fresh air.

“Morn,” Delano said.

“Ya,” Captain Jerome-Paul replied. “The same morning when I last saw you, no?”

Delano coughed a laugh. “My buds and I have to count the days by sunrises, elst we’d neer keep ’em all straight.”

“Then you nay be sailors.”

Delano ran the tip of his tongue along his lower lip and looked back at his two companions: Jackie, admiring the parade of supplies being shouldered up the gangplank; Will, in the process of pacing off the massive deck, stern to bow.

“No,” Delano said. “As I said last night….”

The older man shrugged, lips twisted, his pickled memory useless.

“…we’re landers, got to make Chautown before our travel papers expire.”

Captain Jerome-Paul snorted. “Ya. Let’s pretend I believe that. For a fee….”

“Ten thousand centimes, we said.”

“…For a fee, I can believe you’re Madame Augusta’s left knocker.”

“Mmmm,” said Delano with a knowing smile. “Or Bestilla’s?”

The captain’s lined face sagged grimly. He pointed a finger toward Delano’s nostrils, saying, “I’ll have to put you off at Norfolk, after we makes the wide swing around New York.”

“What? No radiation suits? Ha.”

“And you’ll sleep with the crew in the forecastle. Ya?”

Delano saw that the captain did not want to be humored. “Ya. In the forecastle. Hmph. From the fuckusall to the forecastle.”

Delano leaned onto the doorjamb of the forecastle, the bunks inside all empty except for Jack in his top slot, backboard side. Maybe he wouldn’t mind Jackie’s persistent complaining, he thought to himself, if the little red-haired pig-poker didn’t whine like that, in that squeaky voice—about everything.

“They gots five crew,” Jackie was saying. “Five swagasses, an’ we gotta make do with us three? Hoy, I tole ya I could handle any ship, but this’s one like a fairy tale. Two hunnerd feet and more! Jesus potatoes.”

Delano stared grimly into the darkness of the cramped, sour-smelling room. Jackie was oiling the last of the three snub guns, his knobby fingers gliding a cloth back and forth. He poked a shell into each barrel and clapped the banger shut.

“You look in the captain’s quarters yet?” Delano asked. “It’s licensed by the Monitor like any other ship—framed there on his wall over the tilter jug. She’s got anchor winches fore and aft like any other—so what if they’s 200 feet apart? And sails and sheets and masts—so what if it’s three masts, ’stead of one or two? Think of it like this: The three of us will make three real crewmen. Out of their five, they’ve got captain and cook—which we don’ need for a little skim down ta the Blue Islands. We’ll make do on Will’s slop for a few days, done it afore.”

Jackie was arranging his duffel bag to neatly cover the snub guns on his bunk. “I saw the timbers down inta hold,” he said, looking worried. “With those little deck hatches, I can’t figure for jesus potatoes how they got such long timbers down there.”

Delano laughed, flecking his thumb at the white paint peeling up from the jamb. “There’s an aft hatch, Jackie, half below the water line. Dockside, they loaded the timbers by crane, then caulked the hatch shut.”

Jackie slid to the floor frowning, contemplating the ingenuity. “A hatch flat against the stern, caulked? Hoo. These timbers, they big enough for what you was thinking to build?”

“Ya, but thass my business,” Delano said. He was looking grim again. “And Jackie, long as I’m paying the freight, don’t talk jesus—that sort of thing upset my mama.”

“But ho, jesus potatoes—they’s fine. With whole peppercorns…?”

“Ya, I know. But don’ talk jesus, okay?”

In the deadly heat of late August, mainland visitors were rare. It was the slow season for commerce, especially trade involving perishable goods, human or otherwise. But an elaborate spectacle such as this could not have originated in any place other than the mainland.

From his strategic office perch, hunched over a drawing board, Big Tom probably was first to see the strange skimmer angling for Thomas Harbor. He had just honked down two knife-loads of the powder, and the delicious numbness webbing through his throat made him doubt his perceptions a little.

Hoo. The ship was some kind of harlequin nightmare. It was a two-master, normal enough, but there were no sails to the wind, not so much as a handkerchief. Top mast, there was no flag, but a couple dozen posts around her rails waved bright and flapping streamers in blue, red, and yellow. They seemed to be a taunting send-up of Big Tom’s own banners, the system by which he identified his skimmers from afar.

The merchant grunted, pushed back from his drafting table, and tilted his telescope toward the odd craft. On 150 feet of deck there was not a crewman to be seen, yet the gaudy skimmer was angling accurately for the mouth of the harbor. Big Tom considered that perhaps it was under engine power—some special leniency decreed by the Monitor—but that would not explain the absence of crew. There was something strange, too, about the skimmer’s deck: the shape, perhaps, or the arrangement of its boards. Even in the telescope, he could not make it out.

Down in the shipyard, the faint skeleton of the Lucia II was taking shape. But Big Tom watched the thundering building process falter, and then clatter to a halt, as the ant farm of wood whits turned their attention to the sea spectre slicing through the harbor. Already eager for the start of noon break, fifteen minutes away, the workers were surrendering to the temptation to drop their tools and gather, gawking, on the wharf. Big Tom made a mental note to rail at today’s crew chief—and perhaps he would dock the payroll for the quarter hour.

Big Tom sharpened the focus of his telescope. The pilotless skimmer had now berthed itself comfortably and accurately. Anchor chains fore and aft released themselves on cue, then winched back a bit to steady the yacht. Anchoring at dock, that was odd. But piling ties were now unnecessary, which was fortunate, because there was no crew to throw them.

Big Tom felt a flicker of fear in his chest. He cursed his luck that this otherworldly intrusion would come just as he had slipped comfortably into a powder-induced euphoria. It was a fragile state at best, and there was nothing worse than being high and aggravated at the same time.

Then he snorted a self-deprecating laugh. Hoo. By that standard, he admitted to himself, there was no good time lately for a set-to. He wiped at his nostrils, sighed, and turned for the door.

At the docks, Big Tom could not see over the dozens of heads. Like a common dockside muscler, he elbowed through to the front where a railed gangplank bridged the way from the dock to the foreign skimmer. No one had dared mount it.

The crew chief was there, somewhat embarrassed to find his boss at his side when the work shift was still on clock.

“Who set the gangplank?” Big Tom asked him, deciding to save the other matter for later.

The crew chief shrugged, and flecks of sawdust dropped from his shoulders. “It juss fell,” he said, perplexed, “like it was on balance or something and teetered over.” He held his browned forearm up in the air to demonstrate, and let it waver, then fall.

The day suddenly seemed impossibly bright to Big Tom, the steamy air motionless. His vision shimmered with glints of pure white light. Even a skimmer set to full sail would have a hard time of it in today’s dead air, he thought.

He stared at the gangplank—not your average throw-boards. The rails were intricately carved mahogany, a pattern that reminded him of the back of an ancient rocking chair he had bought for Moori on the mainland. The tread of the walkway seemed to be fresh, black rubber—excellent as a foot grip, but another exhorbitant detail fashioned from rare material. This was not a mere workaday vessel.

He placed a cautious foot onto the rubber matting, and it felt firm and oddly welcoming. He had experienced many emotions about sea skimmers, but never such an overt friendliness. It was a feeling he instinctively wanted to resist, for his intellect—some haggard corner of his mind—was still squirming in fear.

As he topped the gangplank, the murmur of docksmen and wood whits died to a whisper. Big Tom held up the palms of his hands, motioning for the others to stay on the dock.

The skimmer’s deck was polished mahagony as well, and at the sight of it his mouth fell open. In many ways it resembled any other finely kept skimmer top: precise coils of hemp, handsome masts, and thick piles of neatly folded canvas tied in place. But the striking feature was the shape of the deck itself. It was not flat. The gleaming boards swept upward from the center, dovetailing into the rails on each side. It was as if the deck had been crafted from half of a monstrous barrel.

Big Tom stepped onto the deck, expecting to slide on the slick embankment. To his surprise, he found himself standing at an angle, perpendicular to the deck as if the skimmer had its own demented law of gravity. His large stomach soured and his breathing began to come hard, as if all the weight of his belly were drawing against his lungs. He scratched under his beard.

The merchant tried a test. He tip-toed down to the center of the empty deck and found himself upright like the masts. Then he paced slowly up the far curve of the deck, toward the backboard rail. Once the rail was at his feet, he looked back and saw the mast directly overhead—he was standing at right angles to it. Big Tom peered past the skimmer’s rail, afraid that he would see precisely what he saw: the calm harbor stretching straight down from his toes in a wall of aquamarine.

Could he be dreaming? Big Tom thought about it. Hmph. Too real. In a dream, had he ever smelled the salt stench of the docks? Had the sun ever scorched his eyes? In a dream, had he ever felt the vile bubble of vomit pushing at his throat that he felt right now? No.

Big Tom turned around and stepped again toward center deck, his testy stomach settling as he came upright again. Standing at the bottom of the wooden bowl, he wondered if he should call to the others on the dock. Would they see what he saw? Or had the powder and bourbon finally burst some mental gasket, as the late Dr. Scaramouch had always warned him?

As he started for the gangplank, a latch rattled and the door of the aft hatch—presumably leading to the captain’s quarters—fell open. Big Tom stopped and stared at the black rectangle fifty feet away, feeling fear suddenly pressing at him like an awesome weight. He wished he had borrowed a snub gun from one of the toughs on the dock.

A slender, dark-skinned figure stepped out. He wore black leather boots up to the knees, billowy trousers and a dark blouse shot through with random red and gold threads. His head was rimmed with a peach-colored turban folded so that a tail of material fanned protectively over his neck. His chin bore a closely trimmed beard, and a narrow, knotty moustache arced across his upper lip. He was adjusting the turban as he came through the hatch, as if he had just finished dressing, and upon seeing the distraught merchant at center deck, the stranger gasped in shock.

“Hoa-ye! Who are you?”

The words resounded up the curved planking, surrounding Big Tom with ghostly acoustics.

“I, uh, I might ask that of you,” he replied. “You’ve docked in my harbor without permission.”

The dark man’s eyes widened. “We’ve docked? Landed? You mean we’ve made Thomas Island already?” His words were low and ringing, the way congas would sound if they could speak.

“Ya, and I am Big Tom of Thomas Exports, and owner of the island.”

“Ho, then,” said the thin man, growing more comfortable, pushing the turban to an angle. “Ahem. Ah, somebody here call for a doctor? He’s arrived.”

Big Tom’s eyelids sank closed. The edge had now worn off his dose of powder and the cockeyed mania seemed to be subsiding. So that was it—the doctor. Hoo. Finally, some help for Little Tom, still strapped hand and foot in the clinic.

Big Tom opened his eyes, now a little irritated at the showy arrival. “Son, would you go below then and get him. I have an immediate task for the doctor.”

The stranger blinked. He looked back at the open hatch, frowning. For a second, Big Tom thought he saw a flash of deep red in the dark man’s pupils, but he dismissed it as another illusion fomented by the stark sun and the powder.

“Go get him?” the stranger asked. “But ‘him’ is me. I am the doctor sent by the Government.”

Big Tom coughed and felt the sweat gathering in his underdrawers. “Oh, ha. Sorry. But we get rather afield of mainland ways out here. On the islands, these parts, a man such as you would be thought a Rafer.”

“That would be quite natural,” the stranger said. He removed his turban, and a torrent of minuscule black braids fell to his shoulders. Five of the braids were tipped in gold. “Because I am a Rafer. Name’s Rutherford Cross Jr. You may call me Pec-Pec.”

“I have heard of you,” Big Tom said. “Some kind of Rafer ruler.” He took a step backward, even though Pec-Pec had not moved far from the hatch.

The dark-skinned man giggled. “Hmm. A contradiction in terms. Rafer. Ruler. I might help out a government, but I’d nay be one.”

Big Tom’s panic took over. He scrambled for the gangplank on his hands and knees, mindful of the nausea that walking upright would bring him. But the gangplank was no longer in place. It had folded itself in half and clamped into storage position, becoming part of the starboard rail. Big Tom peered over the rail and saw nothing but sea. All around. Starboard, backboard, forward, aft. Thomas Island was not to be found.

The merchant’s chest was heaving, sweat dripping from the tip of his beard as he clung to the rail. “You’ll not kill me without taking a bang or two yourself.”

Pec-Pec waved him down. “I’ll not kill you at all,” he said. “I’m a Healer, as was my father.”

Big Tom groaned, but began to edge himself back toward center deck, sliding on his wide rear until he could stand without vomiting.

“This is an odd crate ya have here. Stands ya on a tilt and docks and sets sail again on her own.”

Pec-Pec threw his hands open, saying, “You’re known far as a shipbuilder, so I guess you unnerstand what it’s like when a skimmer seems to take on a life of her own.”

“You built this thing?”

“Oh, no. Thass part of the problem. Won her in a chess game from a Brazilian undertaker. If I could make a skimmer from my own mind, mayhap she’d be more cooperative, no? But you see I haven’t hammered out all the nickers on this one yet. Sometimes, she juss does what she thinks best.”

“Brazilia?”

“Ho, Brazil. Thass a place many miles south and many years ago—where I got her.” Pec-Pec tapped his foot on the deck. “Bad chess players in Brazil. Back then.”

Big Tom stood weakly. “Well, I can see what ya done to your crew—made ’em sick is what. Nobody could work long on this deck.”

“To a man with the right skills, this is the perfect deck,” said Pec-Pec, looking hurt. He crouched and spread out on all fours, touching his chin to the wood. “Look, to a discroller the curvature of the deck works quite well.” The Rafer began to spin his body against the deck like a jar lid, and abruptly he cartwheeled up the starboard side.

Big Tom gaped. In a blink, Pec-Pec had appeared sitting cross-legged on the starboard rail. This spinning business reminded him of what his house boy, Gregory, had been practicing. So it was a technique the half-wit had learned from the Rafers.

“See?” said Pec-Pec. “From one side of the deck to the other in a fraction of a second. Now, here’s a more important maneuver.” The Rafer dived off of the rail onto the sloping wood. He spun down the deck, up the backboard side, and catapulted himself into the sky.

Big Tom lost sight of him, then spotted him dangling from the high rigging of the main mast. The dark man released his hold and fell to the deck. He diverted the force of his fall by somersaulting onto the wood bank and sliding on his back to the spot where he had originally stood center deck.

Pec-Pec was grinning. “Guess what would have happened to me on a flat deck?”

“That fall,” Big Tom asked wearily, “another Rafer technique?”

“No. The hit-and-roll. Paratroopers.”

“Para…”

“Ancient sky warriors. When people could fly.”

“Oh, yes. Fly. Why not? My grandpa spoke of it, crazy poker.” Big Tom looked to the sky and found not a cloud. The skimmer gave no sense of motion either, and he felt tempted to climb to the rail again to see if they might be returning.

Pec-Pec seemed to read his mind. He sat on the deck and motioned for Big Tom to do the same.

“First we talk,” the Rafer said, pausing until the merchant had eased his sweaty bulk to the deck. “Forgive my toying with you—now I will tell you what I am about. It is true that I am sent by the Government and it is true that I am a Healer, and I will tend to the sick on your island. For a short time anyway.

“But the healing is coincidental to my real purpose here. The Monitor is dead, and the new leaders implement new policy—try to do it quietly, to prevent panic.”

Big Tom stared at his knotty knuckles. He was nearly broke, and he could see that his little empire would never have a chance to revive itself. “Ya should have just sent word with Captain Bull,” he said. “No more barge trips—no more contract on the red-leggers. Right?”

“Ya. But we did send an emissary, our own emissary, directly to you. To ask you to stop the trade, first. And second, to give you a choice: to become an undesireable, a fugitive from the new Government, or to help it with a new mission. But when the trade did not stop—well some of the less patient revolutionaries, they decide to stop the red-legger trade themselves. Start from the mainland first, then work their way out here. Hangings and hackings. Not very discrete, but I’d say your market has dried up.”

“But I never saw this emissary.”