The Dream Vessel (18 page)

“Yes, some call it instinct,” said cartographer H. Fenstemacher Lapp in his small, musty office. “But I like to think of it as science and hard work, too. Those details come only from a lifetime of interviewing sailors—and voyaging meself. Separating the beer blather from the fact, best that it can be done.”

Lapp actually had no lap at all. He sat in a battered oak chair, his belly welling up in creased segments like stacked watermelons. A black string tie draped down over an oxford cloth shirt that spread wide between button holes to reveal hairy flesh.

“Mr. Lapp,” Gregory said politely, still studying a wall hung with framed maps, “doubtless you heard the announcement—that the Monitor is dead, that few of his more restrictive dictates will be enforced by the new Government?”

“Hoo, ya. An’ as if to demonstrate the new leniency, most of the farm camp management here is swinging from hemp.”

Gregory’s jaw muscles bulged rhythmically. “It can not be denied,” he said. “But it was a mistake, being that harsh. Some of them should have hung, I unnerstand—with a trial, too—but not so many. But what I have to say to you is that the old restrictions connected to your profession are undone now—about cross-ocean travel, about charting those territories. Whatever is out there is not ta be feared, but explored.”

Lapp patted his fingertips together in dainty but sarcastic applause. “An’ what means this ta me?”

“What means this is that for weeks I have been wandering the docks and shelter houses, Customs bins and what-have-you. You are the best of the catographers, everyone agrees, and I am needing a cartographer for a new Government mission—to cross the Big Ocean. What I am needing of a cartographer is two things: one, the course-charting with the captain, of course, and to map the new lands as we find them; two, the ancient maps what the Monitor had ordered destroyed—only a man of your science would have dared to keep such things.”

Lapp’s eyes narrowed, and he scratched at his belly in one of the openings of stressed oxford cloth. “I am an abider of the law,” the cartographer said, “an’ I’ll not have you implying otherwise.”

Gregory turned away from the wall to look Lapp in the eyes. “I really don’t care about that, and no harm can come to you now for having ancient maps. But I was noticing a mistake you made in an early map, mayhap thirty years old—it was mounted in a home here in Chautown. The map showed remarkable coastline detail around the Gulf of Texaco even along the radiation fields, where no sane captain would take his ship. Your later maps here are more cautiously vague, of course, but I was wondering where ya might have gotten such detail as a younger man unless you had for reference the maps made before the radiation fields were irradiated—ancient times.”

Lapp shifted his bulky frame in the chair and pinched his whiskered chin. “I guess ya have me there,” he said. He paused long in thought. “Tell me more about this expedition?”

As the dim lump of Crown Mountain appeared on the horizon all of Gregory’s old dread returned like a virulent flu. Big Tom was waiting there for him. Whatever had become of the old slaver’s mania, Gregory would know soon enough. He imagined Thomas Harbor scorched by a madman’s fury—twenty skimmers bottom up in the shallows, perhaps; the blackened tips of pilings all that remains of the docks; a plume of smoke rising from the ruin of the mainhouse; worst of all, those valuable, sweeping Northland timbers of the new ship splintered about the beach—tomorrow’s driftwood. Just how extensive was Big Tom’s potential for self-destruction?

It could not be as bad as that. By sea courier, Gregory had received Big Tom’s emotionless directive to collect his emissaries in Chautown and to haul out a final skimmer-load of provisions—even the perishables, which meant that the first overseas exploration was about to begin. Somehow through his powder fog and despair, Big Tom must have finished a reasonable ocean craft.

Gregory crossed his sweatered arms over his chest against the early chill. He shared the seventy feet of deck only with the pimply young captain and two grizzled crewmen. Still dozing in the cabins below were Gregory’s newly recruited explorers—the mapmaker-navigator named Lapp, an inventive cook who was also familiar with photographic equipment, and four sea hands proven loyal to the new Government.

The youthful skimmer captain had been eager to make this charter run to Thomas Island—he let on that he considered the Blue Islands to be an opening frontier for trade, now that the new Government was extending its influence and protection.

“The Rafers, them on the islands, they’re amenable would you think to an influx of mainlanders—the trade good for all of us?” he had asked. Gregory had nodded affirmatively, although he was certain the Rafers had not been consulted. Those negotiations would be among a long list of fine points to iron out over the years.

By the time Gregory’s chartered skimmer rounded the southwest corner of the island, the morning mist had burned off. This inner crescent of Thomas Island shimmered in the early light, docile and intact, perfect as a fresh pastry. And there on the west side of the harbor lolled a wooden behemoth dubbed the Nina. Her broad siding cut such a swath in the water that Gregory’s eye muscles contorted, doubting that their focus could be proper. She was military neat, too: rigging taut, spotless, sails precisely folded, sheets coiled.

Big Tom, Gregory told himself, is alive and well and in control.

“Gregory, I want ta tell ya a story on myself, boy. An’ I want ya to consider it the next time ya decide to poke me in the arse like ya did when ya took Moori to the mainland.”

Big Tom had perched himself regally on a stool in his open-air office, commanding the room. His beard bobbed hyperly as he spoke, and Gregory found himself thinking: Maybe Bishop is telling the truth. Maybe Big Tom did quit the powder once his final-last wife had abandoned him. As soused as Big Tom might get on land, Bishop insisted, he never failed to hang straight when it came to captaining a ship. And his massive new skimmer, the Government-commissioned Nina, was now fully rigged.

Bishop had helped himself to Big Tom’s stuffed chair and Bark towered behind him sullenly. Two of the Government toughs, the quiet one named Widekilter and the baudy one named Guinness, carried ugly pistols in unsnapped hip holsters. Pec-Pec’s eyes danced around the room merrily, as if the proceedings were no more explosive than a picnic’s.

Attention duly garnered, Big Tom began his story: “What ey Bark? A score of years ago, me and Bark comes up with a near mutiny as we was picking between the radiation fields looking for a particular ganja farm.” Bark gave an obedient nod, and Gregory wondered if this was the same dubious mutiny story he had heard a dozen versions of in Sanders’s pub.

“Once we found the farm,” Big Tom said, “the crew dropped the sheets and swore we were pickin’ up nay bales until I agreed to split the proceeds evenly among all—ta compensate for the dancy-dance around the radiation. Hmph.

“Well I say, now, that a man ain’t bound by promise made under extortion like that. Once we entered the Out Islands up these parts, Bark and I decided we could handle the skimmer ourselves and thought to teach the crew a lesson. We put ’em off on that bare rock called Dead Man’s Chest. Ya know? A hunk of harddick twenty miles from nothing.

“Told ’em we might be back in a few days—ta take the survivors home. And we left ’em plenty to drink. A case of rum. Hah. Stranded for days, and nothing but alcohol.

“What would you choose, Gregory? One of four men, ya don’t know when rescue will come, and the only drink to be had will dehydrate you quicker than drinking nothing at all. What would you choose? Better to drink—and die quickly but stoned? Or better to thirst and wait, trust in the rescue? What do you think we found when we returned, Gregory?”

Gregory was in no mood for guessing. His forehead felt tight, as if a migraine might be returning. “I…don’t…know,” he said.

“You’re right!” Big Tom cried, laughing. “No one knows. These twenty years, Bark an’ I haven’t bothered to go back yet!” The reaction in the room ranged from Bishop’s dutiful chuckle to Pec-Pec’s grim silence.

Gregory threw his hands open, pleading innocence. “I can assure you, Big Tom, as a representative of the new Government, that I have no intention of letting personal feelings interfere with our voyage,” he said.

Big Tom sneered. He stood and marched to his drafting table, where he pulled open a drawer and extracted a small bundle of letters. His beard of gray speckles quivered. “These,” he said, shaking the stack of papers at Gregory, “are letters from Moori. Says she wants to come back when things settle down, that she regrets her mistake with the half-wit—thass what she calls you, Gregory. The night in the shed with her—know what she thought of it, ey? She thinks it was yer first time, Gregory. Mmmm? First time? Heheee! What are you—thirty-five?”

“Well there’s a man name of Lesoli….” Gregory desperately wanted to blurt the details of Moori’s new lover, but he instantly regretted that his sheet could be yanked so easily.

Big Tom threw the letters onto the drafting table, eyes cold. “Who…is…Lesoli?”

The tension in the room began to harden like concrete. Silent seconds ticked by. “Ah, Big Tom, I was changing us from a painful subject,” Gregory finally said. He lifted his leather case from the floor, unknotted the center tie, and drew out several sheets of yellowed, delicate paper. “Um, Lesoli is a merchant in Chautown, a trader of ancient items gleaned from the salvagers. Some he sells to the science waggos—Cred Faiging and the like. Piddling knacks he sells out of a retail shop in Chautown. But these”—Gregory tapped his finger theatrically on the worn papers—“I had to harangue for, threaten for. They’s maps. Ancient maps, not just of the north continent, but over the Big Ocean, too. It’s what we need, Big Tom—to find what’s left of what once was.”

“An’ ain’t no more,” Bishop threw in sarcastically.

All of the ill tension drained from Big Tom’s face, and his eyebrows spread with childlike wonder.

“Maps!” the aging mariner shouted. “No! They’re all destroyed—orders of the Monitor, hunnerds of years. Can’t be real maps.”

“Real maps,” Gregory answered. The lie he had told about Lesoli prevented him from explaining their real source, however. He would have to warn the cartographer Lapp about the story.

Big Tom took the delicate papers reverently, cradling them as carefully as one would a baby, and laid them one by one onto his drawing table. “Ooohh,” he said lustfully, “they got to be real. Lookit the paper.” He pointed. “England! Pig…poke. England. It’s where Eng-glish comes from, ya know?”

The others were standing now around the table, in awe of the impossible documents, but Big Tom was already a step beyond. The former slaver turned to Gregory again, face empty of animosity: “This ain’t a wild poke into the unknown, then—an’ you knew it, dint ya?”

Gregory nodded modestly.

Big Tom stared up at the ceiling, calculating new possibilities. “An’ ya say ya brought a cartographer? Ah! I knew the mission would sail, but…” His face beamed. “Maps!”

The same tug that old Captain Bull had once flogged into slaving duty was in port—brought this time by the new Government toughs. So they cabled it up, ready to tow the Nina out of Thomas Harbor once preparations were done. The Nina’s maneuverability was yet untested, so it was better to have a graceless exit than a founder in the shallows.

Gregory observed from the aft deck, by the hatch to the officers’ quarters, dazed as he watched the deck and rigging aswarm with sailors. At starboard, the blind chronicler Jersey Saple teetered on the gangplank with his sun reader balanced on his right shoulder. Little Tom stood on the docks, arms akimbo—he would stay behind, watch after the old man’s interests. The younger’s skin still was quite dark, but at least he did not mind so much showing himself in public anymore.

Gregory was still awed by the Nina’s size. Five hunnerd feet of wooden craft went against all human instincts—by proportion, he mused, the ship must have all of the stability of a child’s boat, one made of folded paper. Big Tom had explained the science of it to him patiently—for it was Gregory that had to certify that the captain had met his obligations to the new Government. But it was hard to trust that mere steel banding looped around the hull would keep this monstrosity together.

Center deck, Big Tom was in a full-lung shouting match with the decksman Verrengia, an independent shrimper by trade—not so submissive as the old merchant’s regular sheet winders.

Gregory could hear only bits of the conversation, but it appeared the deck salt was balking at an order to clear a last few sacks of mangoes out of the way and into the holds. Big Tom had angrily thrown his walking stick aside, and through the intermittent cracks of rising sail Gregory heard him bellow the foulest of possible obscenities. But just when Gregory thought the scene would get violent, the old seaman’s shoulders sagged sadly inside his crisp white blouse. From a distance, Big Tom appeared to have surrendered the argument amicably, and he threw a fat arm around back of Verrengia’s neck.

The two stood awkwardly locked centerdeck as the captain drew from his thigh pocket a fat bone flute and blew four long and mournful notes. The scurrying sailors halted, and especially grim were those who had long crewed on Big Tom’s skimmers.

“Men!” Big Tom shouted, and the word disappeared into the morning gusts now clean of other human sound. “We go asail today under the flag of the new Government and under the command of Big Tom. An’ them what know me best know how an argument with the commander will be ended.”

With one arm still crooked around Verrengia’s neck, Big Tom gave the bone flute a shake. The shaft clattered to the deck, leaving a narrow steel blade in the captain’s hand. With a quick lunge, Big Tom thrust the steel through the sailor’s neck and severed the top of his spinal cord. Verrengia’s head nodded, and the body fell away, leaving a splatter of crimson across Big Tom’s fresh blouse. Big Tom was casually wiping the blade on his ruined blouse when Gregory marched up.

“You pushed that boy to an argument,” Gregory accused.

Big Tom patiently reassembled the bone flute and jammed it into his thigh pocket. “Ya. Hmph. Ya. But he warn’t a regular, y’unnerstand. I juss brought ’im on for something like this—will keep the rest of ’em scared for their dicks most of the voyage.”

Gregory bit the edge of his tongue until he tasted blood. He recalled Billister, pen poised behind a large desk in Chautown, politely declining to join the expedition. Gregory wished it had been that simple for himself. He about-faced, walked as calmly as he could to the officers’ hatch, and went below.

Pec-Pec sat alone at the grand table in the center cabin, poking delicately at a dozen oddly shaped pieces of ebony the size of horse teeth. The magic man’s eyes flitted up at the intruder and down again.

“Gregory….”

There came no reply. Pec-Pec’s guest paced about the small room fitfully, his face turning redder and redder.

“Gregory, have you ever played chess like this?” He nudged another shard of ebony a few inches across the polished top of the grandtable. “Chess, I mean, without a chess board? Hmm?”

Gregory sputtered his lips impatiently. “Ho, it’s not so hard I imagine if you’re the only player. Who needs a board? Who needs pieces what look like chessmen? Who needs rules?”

Pec-Pec’s expression hardened into exasperation. The dark man removed a piece from the grand table and tucked it between the strands of hair at the tip of one of his braids. Quietly and methodically he played through his game, removing every piece the same way. Then he stood.

“You can’t leave,” Gregory said. “The man—Big Tom, I’m sayin’—is gullybonkers. We’ll not have any crew left by mid-ocean.”

Pec-Pec’s nostrils flared. He shrugged. “I can advise. I can not do for you or your Government. I must go.”

“But you killed the Monitor!” Gregory said. “How could this be so much more than that—to escort the first expedition overseas?”

Pec-Pec’s eyelids closed and seemed to quiver. “The dragon fish and I—we killed the Monitor, ya. An’ that was much much too much. Not again will I slay monsters for the Government of the Fungus People.” He placed a long booted foot on the ladder up to the main deck.

“Final advice then, Pec-Pec?”

Slowly, the magic man pointed a bony finger toward the empty grand table. “Ya,” he said. “Learn it quickly—how to play chess without a chess board.”

The Nina had been towed mid-harbor by the time Pec-Pec arrived on deck. He strode to the starboard rail, his black silks snapping in the wind. Then he turned a quick back flip and disappeared into the brine below. There was a great hissing and thrumbling under the water, and a black figure in the shape of a giant manta ray darted off toward Pec-Pec’s anchored craft, the odd skimmer with the deck shaped like half a barrel. All of this was witnessed by no one.

Outside the captain’s quarters, Gregory twisted his toe against the planking. The ship was groaning with the unnatural stresses of being towed out to sea, and Gregory strained to make out the voices inside—Big Tom and someone. Courtesy had to be suspended, however, in the face of the deliberate murder of a crewman. The new Government’s mission to Europe was embarking under untenable circumstances, in Gregory’s judgment, and the voyage had to be stopped to regroup. He would have to interrupt Big Tom.

He lifted a fist to rap the door, hesitated, and just threw the oak panel open. In such an act of bravado, one is not surprised to catch lovers embracing, perhaps, or an occupant attending to personal hygiene. But never could Gregory have been prepared for the shock he felt now, the horror that clenched its sickening tendrils around his gut: He had interrupted a conversation between Big Tom and a vile-looking cat-boy, the Cantilou, a living, pulsing version of the sadly stuffed creature he had seen in the garden shed on Thomas Island.

Big Tom jutted his beard toward the door. “Ah,” he drawled casually, “wang it shut, would ya?”

Gregory reluctantly obeyed, then stepped into the room with the anguished feeling that he had blundered into another man’s nightmare. Big Tom stood near a massive desk gleaming of polish. The Cantilou lay on the captain’s bunk, forward paws flat against the blanket and rear legs relaxed into two muscular discs on either side of its buttocks.

Gregory spoke to Big Tom: “In the shed, it was an old stuffed cat what you had, no?”

Although its lips did not move, Gregory heard the voice of the Cantilou, and clearly Big Tom did as well. “You see what I wish you to see,” the beast told him, “in the same way that you are hearing the words that I wish you to hear.”

Big Tom was looking puzzled, and the aging captain huffed his fat frame down into the desk chair. “Ho up here,” he said.

“Ho up your own,” the Cantilou’s voice replied gruffly, although the boy’s face on the feline body still showed no emotion. Its wide black eyes stared indiscriminately. “You, Big Tom, with an ego larger even than yer belly, wishes to be the first captain across the Big Ocean. An’ you, Greggie, the blind soldier of this new Government—well, for both a ya, this is a day for a change of expectations.”

Big Tom stroked one set of fingers through his beard and turned his puzzled eyes on Gregory. It began to dawn on Gregory that the rotund captain was nearly as baffled as he.

The cabin had grown unnaturally warm, and Gregory was aware now of a gut-turning odor, as if the stench of the darkening blood splashed across Big Tom’s blouse were amplified forty times.

They heard the Cantilou sigh, and the beast delicately crossed its paws. “Hoo, well,” it said, “wouldn’t ya think it time to go up on deck?”

It was then that Gregory noticed the muffled shouts and foot-poundings coming from above, signs of a crew in panic. The two men stood simultaneously and bolted out the door, down the corridor, through the center cabin to the hatch ladder. There they had to wait as six of the new Government’s toughs clamored down. Gregory caught Widekilter’s elbow—Gregory liked him best—and said, “What is it?”

Widekilter slapped the butt of his holstered pistol. “Prolly we’ll be needin’ something bigger. Going down to tear into the lockers.”

The Cantilou, alone in Big Tom’s cabin, uncrossed its forepaws and sighed again: “Hoo.” Heard by no one.

Just minutes before, the crew had cast off the tow line and the tug that had pulled them to open water was circling its thrumping and labored way back toward Thomas Harbor while a deckhand astern reeled in the cable. Out of the harbor’s protection, the spring sea had come to life, darkened, glistening, like a lolling plain of liquid obsidian. The Nina was now at half-sail, as she was expected to be until they cleared the Out Islands.

But it was the horizon that had inspired the howls and panic. Evenly spaced, in all directions of open sea, were nine dark skimmers of unmistakable design: the sleek new vessels that the Rafers had somehow come to possess.

Nine. Who’d a thought the savages could have built so many in just a few seasons? Or crewed them competently?

Bark was apoplectic up on the pilot’s deck, shouting his orders. Sailors scrambled like monkeys through the rigging to set the Nina full sail, with the thought of ramming past the Rafers if they intended any harm. Two decksmen were setting the gunpowder and shot in each of the ship’s six cannons—three starboard and three backboard.

Big Tom turned to Gregory and grumbled, “Ho, it’s a pig’s arse of a morning,” then limped off toward his first mate.

“I’ve headed ’er due east,” Bark shouted as his captain approached. “Hang ’er like so an’ pray ta god we juss have to meet one Rafer skimmer head-on. Two more, most, might catch us broadside. But it’d take six er more of those little things ta do us much harm.”

The Rafer skimmers were still quite distant, and Big Tom had not had a chance to draw out a telescope from the servator on the backboard rail. “Those back six, then, can we outrun them?” he asked.

Bark squinted into the unfamiliar rigging of the new ship and glanced astern. He shrugged—who could really know? “We get full sail boogerin’ fast, I’d say ya,” he replied.

Big Tom dug the fingers of his right hand into his beard. He glanced back at the diminishing Thomas Island, the spits of land forming the harbor like a protective embrace. The wind pushed his hair up into a demented, graying halo. “Would not it be better to come about? Take ’er back in?”

“Time we come full ’round, I gully they’d be on us,” Bark hollered impatiently—he had considered all of the options, of course.

“I ’spect they’d go after the sails with fire arrows—put us to a stop,” the captain said. “Have the hands haul up buckets of water in case.”

Bark’s black eyes shifted away. “Ya, Big Tom, soon’s we’re full sail.”

“And have all starboard cannon draw bead on that one skimmer,” Big Tom ordered, wagging a finger eastward.

Gregory found Jersey Saple clinging unsteadily to his sun reader as the deck surged and then fell away with increasing urgency. A portfolio of dot scriptings fell from its storage slot on the apparatus, and the pin-pricked papers scattered on the decking. “I’d meant to lash the reader down, but we’ve made such a rough start,” the scribe told Gregory, his sightless eyes rolling wildly. “Help me, hey, or it’ll be dashed ta kindling.”

Gregory dragged the sun reader to the wall below the pilot’s deck and tied it securely. He placed Saple’s hand on a rail post. “Hold ’er there till we’re out of this.”

“What’s all the poking fuss?” Saple asked.

“Oh, Rafer skimmers. All over—gawd. They’s closing in, but I’m not sure thass such a danger,” Gregory said. “You know a crew like this, what been hauling red-leggers up until now. Sets ’em on edge.”

“Ya, sets ’em on edge,” Saple repeated, as if trying to reassure himself.

The Nina plunged ahead ever more forcefully as each square of canvas pulled taut and billowed. Her bow pounded through the gentle waves effortlessly, dolphinlike. But still the Rafer outriggers sliced closer. They were visible now in precise detail: long and elegant shafts lilting over the emerald water. Intricately carved aplustres bobbed from their sterns like the tailfeathers of demon swans.

The one Rafer skimmer straight ahead had turned east as well, and was matching the Nina’s speed and direction closely enough to come alongside. Bark ordered the helmsman to veer a few degrees south to evade, but the smaller skimmer did the same easily, and it became clear that such maneuvering would slow the expeditioners fatally.

Finally, a flower of black smoke burst silently over the near skimmer, and seconds later the ominous sound—the crack of gunpowder—reached the Nina. Then a cabled lance crashed into the Nina’s starboard side.

Big Tom sprinted forward and leaned over the rail to look. It was a multipronged harpoon. The point had burst through the hull just below the forward cannon, and four anterior barbs had sunk themselves securely into the wood. The harpoon’s thick hemp cable sagged into the sea in the direction of the Rafer skimmer.

The fat captain spat, turned back, and grabbed a passing sheetsman by the sleeve. “Where’s yer blade, Fenton?” he demanded, and the frightened seaman produced a ten-incher from his thigh strap. “Over!” Big Tom demanded. “Whack the line, son.”