Sky Run (8 page)

We made it to the harbour. Some Drools were gathered by our boat. They looked up at our approach. One of the Drools was better dressed than the others. Not for him old shorts and T-shirts. His clothes were as good as Reynold's had been, though he lacked Reynold's height.

‘How is it? Is it done?'

‘My dear lady … Casper Jones, at your service.'

Peggy gave him the once-over.

‘So? Is it done?'

‘Done? My dear lady, your solar engines were completely smashed. And not just that. The alternator too, and the solenoids and the heat exchanger and, well … a whole host of other matters too technical for you to understand.'

‘Try me,' Peggy said.

Casper smiled indulgently and made a gesture with his hands.

‘It's complicated, madam. Only a Drool can fix this. A lady like yourself –'

And the other Drools around him nodded in agreement.

‘Get out the way,' Peggy said. She got onto the deck and inspected the solar engine. We followed her on board. The solar panels had all been replaced. I couldn't really see what else needed to be done.

‘As you can see –' Casper began.

‘As I can see,' Peggy said, ‘the alternator is fine – and needs a new coil at most, which can be fitted in five minutes. The solenoid has got nothing to do with it and isn't broken anyway. Because there is no solenoid. So I don't know what you're talking about. And as for the heat exchanger, it isn't even up on deck, is it? So how could it have got damaged? Huh?'

Casper's mouth dropped open. The other Drools looked at him expectantly. He cleared his throat.

‘Madam – knows – about solar engines?' he began, diffidently now.

‘Madam does,' Peggy said. ‘Madam installed the engine. Madam built the boat.'

Casper looked the other Drools. They looked back at him.

‘Madam – built the boat?' he echoed.

‘Madam did,' Peggy said. ‘With madam's own two hands. And a bit of help from madam's friends.'

And she stuck her hands out so he could get a look at them and admire the calluses.

‘Ah,' Casper said. ‘I see –'

Some replacement parts were on the dock side. Peggy started picking through them and holding them up.

‘Madam –' Casper wanted to stop her.

‘Here we are. New coil. That'll do it. Hand me that screwdriver and the ratchet thing.'

‘Madam, this is a Drool's job –'

‘And don't get in the way now –'

Casper and the five Drools beside him watched silently as Peggy replaced the alternator coil.

‘OK. Martin, go and turn the key and look at the charge meter.'

He disappeared for all of half a minute.

‘It's all working,' he said. ‘Full reading. Full charge.'

‘Right. Here's your tools back. Tell me what I owe you for parts and labour, and I think we're done and on our way.'

Casper never took his eyes off her. There was something in that look, as if he could cheerfully have killed her.

‘How much do I owe you? You know?'

‘Of course, madam, of course. But Mr Reynold let me know in advance that all works should be charged to his account. It just requires a signature from you.'

‘We pay our own way. What's the damage?'

Before Casper could say anything further, she plucked the bill from his hands.

‘What?'

Casper looked defiant but uncomfortable.

‘I could buy a new boat for this.'

‘Madam is maybe not familiar with the price of solar panels –'

‘No. Madam is very familiar. And not only that, Madam knows a rip-off when she sees one. And madam is not paying this. Gemma, go and get my purse from the strongbox.'

Down I went, got the purse, then back onto the deck. Peggy took out a note worth a hundred International Currency Units.

‘Keep the change,' she said, and handed it to Casper.

‘But the bill says –'

‘I can see what the bill says, and one thousand twelve hundred Units is a little pricey for new panels costing fifty. The other fifty's for your labour. I regard the additional thousand you have down here for the work as also excessive. So there's your money. I'll thank you for your time and trouble. Now, if you'll excuse us, we'll be on our way.'

Peggy held the money out for him to take. Reluctantly, he took it.

‘Now, you just write
Paid
there on that bill. OK? Then everything'll be settled and we'll be gone.'

I didn't think he would agree to do it, but he felt in his coat pocket for a pen. He clicked it open. He smiled at Peggy humourlessly and without warmth.

‘Madam really doesn't understand how things are done here –' he began.

‘Yes, I do,' Peggy said. She pointed to the top of the hill. ‘They have the money. But you have the knowledge. So you rob them blind. And because they don't know any better, they go on paying. And you're building yourself a brand- new house, there on the corner of the shanty town. And, little by little, you're moving up the hill, Mr Casper. Is that not right?'

Casper smiled more broadly and with a little more warmth, unabashed to have been discovered, pleased to have his cleverness revealed.

‘And one day, correct me if I'm wrong, but one day, sooner or later – and probably sooner, I'm guessing, though I don't really know why –'

‘Gut instinct, madam?' Casper gave a sardonic, tight-lipped smile.

‘Possibly so. But one day soon, something will happen – some incident – some tipping point – and the people with the knowledge on this island are going to take over from the ones who are ignorant. And I wouldn't be surprised if one twilight time – if you get night-time here –'

‘We do indeed, madam,' Casper said, and he indicated a satellite island that had come in to orbit between the island of Ignorance and the sun. ‘Our satellite isle. We call it Bliss.'

‘One twilight time, when the international police patrol ships are nowhere to be seen, it wouldn't surprise me to see a whole crowd of people flocking up that hill, up to those fine villas, carrying torches and firebrands – and then, well … topsy-turvy, I think, Mr Casper. Would that be right?'

The smile didn't go; it remained on his face, fixed and friendly.

But, ‘I think that might be right, madam,' he said, in all but a whisper. ‘Madam is a wise old lady.'

‘No. Not wise. Just not ignorant,' Peggy said. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Casper. If it's all right with you, we'll be on our way.'

‘Be my guest, madam.'

‘Then we'll say goodbye.'

He didn't have to let us go. He could easily have stopped it. There were dozens of Drools milling around the harbour. It wouldn't have taken much to prevent us. But he let us sail. And soon there was safe, unbridgeable space between us. We could easily have catcalled and thumbed our noses. But, for some reason, that felt like the last thing you wanted to do.

As we sailed out into open space, we saw the satellite isle of Bliss come between Ignorance and the sun, and night-time came to them there, and the darkness leaked up around the island, and the villas and the town disappeared from view, swallowed by night.

But then, the strangest thing happened. Lights appeared. Small, flickering lights; a few at first, and then more and more, as if people were lighting matches, only these lights didn't burn out. They appeared to congregate, to gather together and then to move, in a kind of procession, and to rise as they went, as if marching through the main street of the town of Ignorance and going up into the hills.

And then there was the far, far sound of voices calling, but so far away it was like the sound of distant rain falling into a lake. And then the small flames ignited into larger ones, which were taken by the wind, and soon the hills were on fire.

And we watched the flames, and the villas burning, and we didn't say a word to each other, not one single word, until I couldn't bear the silence any longer and I had to speak the thoughts that were going through my mind.

‘So ignorance is bliss, is it –?'

‘And knowledge is power, Gemma,' Peggy said. ‘Knowledge is power.'

She came and stood between us, and put her arms around us both. And we stood and watched the houses burning, and we heard the distant shouts and cries for help, though there was nothing we could do to help anyone. And then she gently, very gently, turned our heads away.

Sometimes, back on Peggy's island, I'd find something lying around – like a metal rod or an old stick or something – and I'd pretend it was a gun, and go shooting things up. Peggy saw me doing so once, and said, ‘Martin, where did you get
that
from?'

‘Picked it up, Peggy,' I said. ‘It was lying on the shore.'

You get all kinds of stuff drifting in on the solar tide. I found some money once, paper notes. I gave them to Peggy and she locked them away for the future.

Of course, it's only light and feathery stuff that drifts in. Anything substantial, it starts to sink in the atmosphere, picking up speed as it goes, and then it's that big, dry splash and a moment's flickering as it burns up in the sun.

‘I don't mean where did you get the piece of wood from. I mean, where did you get the idea to turn it into a gun and go bang-banging around the place?'

Well, I didn't know. The idea just sort of came to me. I didn't make any effort to think it up.

‘I don't know, Peggy. It was kind of … inspiration.'

At which she gave me one of her one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old hard-pickled looks.

‘Inspiration? Not what I'd be calling it. More the sort of thing a hooligan might do.'

‘What's a hooligan, Peggy?'

‘Someone who likes a fight and causing trouble. You'll be able to look it up in the big dictionary when we go to City Island.'

‘Won't it be in the little dictionary?' I said.

‘It will,' Peggy agreed. ‘But small dictionaries just give small definitions. Besides, my dictionary's ninety years old if it's a turning. And words can change their meanings.'

Which surprised me somewhat.

‘Words can change their meanings?'

‘Sometimes, Martin.'

‘How?'

‘They just do.'

‘But isn't that kind of like … changing your name? Like, a Martin is a Martin. How could “Martin” change its meaning? That would make me someone else.'

‘It's called common usage. You take a word like
wicked
. Once, wicked meant bad and evil. Then it came to mean pretty good and excellent stuff. But as far as I know, a hooligan is still a hooligan. But, as I'm ninety years out of touch, maybe a hooligan is someone saintly by now. But anyway, put the gun down, Martin, and don't stick it in my face.'

‘I was only playing …'

‘Yeah. I know. What's bothering me is why.'

‘I don't know. I was just pretending.'

‘I just don't know what put the idea into your head. You don't see Gemma bang-banging at things.'

‘She's not so perfect.'

‘That's not what I'm saying. Perfection doesn't come into it. It's the ways we're imperfect is the trouble. Some imperfections are more tolerable than others.'

I'd seen Gemma pulling the fins off sky-fish when we were smaller. I don't say she did it out of evil, more out of curiosity, and I'd never seen her do it since. But no one's perfect is all I'm getting at and there are other ways to be a hooligan than to go bang-banging with a pretend gun. It's just that sisters are more hooligans on the quiet and the sly. Girls do nasty things too, seems to me, but they're more likely to get away with it, as they try and look angelic afterwards so nobody would suspect.

‘I think I got the idea from old Ben Harley,' I said. ‘He's got a gun.'

‘Yes, you're right,' Peggy said. ‘He has, hasn't he? He's got that old harpooner. And if he goes on drinking that private stash of his the way he does, he's going to end up shooting himself in the foot.'

‘Would that hurt?' I asked, wondering if we might hear Ben Harley yelling when he finally got round to shooting himself in the foot, even though his island was quite some distance away.

‘What do you think, Martin?'

‘It would hurt.'

‘It would hurt like hell. He'll end up walking round on a wooden leg, if he's not careful. Though no doubt it would match his wooden brain.'

‘Thought we weren't supposed to use words like hell, Peggy.'

‘No, kiddo. You're not to use words like hell. I get to use them whenever I like.'

‘Why's that, Peggy? Isn't that like don't do as I do but do as I –?'

‘No it isn't. It's not do as I say at all. I don't want you saying as I say, or you'll end up a foul-mouthed hick from the way-backs, and when you get to City Island they'll think you're a little savage – which, going by that gun there, they may have some grounds for supposing.'

‘So why's it all right for you to say words like hell, Peg, and not me?'

‘Because I'm one hundred and twenty years old and I've paid my dues and you're not and you haven't.'

‘So when I'm a hundred and twenty years old and I've paid my dues can I say words like hell then?'

‘You seem to be saying them now, far as I can hear.'

‘I mean, can I go saying them on a regular basis?'

‘Martin, if you ever get to be my age, you can swear like a trooper all day long. You have my permission.'

‘Will you give me a note saying I can do that?'

‘The hell I will.'

‘You're saying it again, Peggy.'

‘I've got provocation.'

‘What?'

‘You. You and that damn toy gun.'

‘You've gone and said damn now, Peggy.'

‘The hell I have.'

‘No, you did. I heard you say it.'

‘Martin, find something else to play with, can't you? I don't like guns.'

‘But you've got a harpooner too. Hidden away. I've seen it.'

‘Really? Well, two things about that. One, what are you doing rummaging about in my hidden-aways?'

‘I came upon it by accident.'

‘The hell you did. Two, that harpooner is for emergencies only, big emergencies. I don't like guns, Martin. Not even pretend ones. You play at war and soldiers and shooting things, next thing you know you're all grown up and you are a soldier and you
are
shooting things. Only, after you've pulled the trigger, what you pointed the gun at doesn't get up.'

‘Oh, I was only passing the time, Peg.'

‘I know. I know you're a good person at heart, Martin. It's just sometimes playing at something is conditioning, preparation, you might say, for the real thing.'

‘Well, I'll throw it away then.'

‘No, you don't have to do that. I'm not forbidding it. You play with it as much as you like.'

‘I don't really want to any more.'

‘Well, you want to come and help me go rock-combing?'

‘Yes, OK. Think we'll find anything today?'

‘You never know.'

So I just left the piece of wood by the coast there and we went rock-combing – which is searching the rocks for whatever the wind and solar tide might have brought in. Most of it's rubbish, but you occasionally find useful stuff.

Anyhow, what put me in mind of all this, after we left the island of Ignorance and continued on our way with our repaired and working solar engines back intact, was what appeared in the sky a day or two later. It happened on my watch, too, which is why I so exactly remember all the details and such.

It's mostly boring being on watch. Boring but – according to Peggy – necessary. The Toll Troll had proved that. (You know, I think I maybe use that expression a lot, or even too much.
According to Peggy
. Most of what I know is
according to Peggy
. I think maybe she ought to write her memoirs and put down all her choice phrases and sayings and call it
According to Peggy
.

But I don't know if anyone would publish it as it would be full of hells and damns, and a whole lot worse, and the righteous (whom Peggy doesn't have much time for) would say it was disgusting and try to have it banned, which would probably tickle her pink no end, and maybe even tickle her yellow too. Because, why does it have to be pink that you're tickled? I don't know. I don't see why you can't be a whole rainbow tickled – even tickled infrared and ultraviolet, come to that.

Occasionally, in among the tedium, being on watch has its interesting moments too. Because you never know what might come along: a sky-whaler chasing a sky-whale, sky-jellies, an algae bloom, a full-on midge swarm – and they have to be seen to be believed.

They travel through the sky like tornadoes. If you can't avoid a midge bloom, they'll cause you misery untold. They get into everything: your eyes, lungs, throat, down in your clothes, into the galley, the food, every crevice of the ship. Even Ben Harley's private stash won't repel a whole swarm of midges. It's said that if you get enough of them, they can strip a sky-shark to the bone. One minute it's a sky-shark, the next it's just a skeleton flying through the air. Don't know if I believe that, but it's what Ben Harley says.

So it was my watch and I had the scope to my eye and I was looking. I looked here, I looked there. I didn't see anything except blue sky and a few tiny clouds and some black spots that had to be islands in the far, far away. That or dirt on the lens.

I took a rest. Peggy and Gemma were sprawled on the deck, both with their eyeshades on and both asleep and snoring. I mean, when I'd been asleep they'd say to me, ‘Martin, you were snoring again.' Or, ‘Martin, you were talking in your sleep.' Or, ‘Martin, would you like to know what you were doing when you were dozing back then?'

And they'd make out that when it came to them they were all ladylike and dainty sleepers. But the truth was, they were driving them home like saw-fish. But whenever I told them that they both snored something terrible, they wouldn't believe me, and made out it was sour grapes and I was making it all up. So that's girls for you as far as I could tell – big snorers but pretending otherwise. Not that Peggy's a girl, but she was once.

When I tackled her on the subject of girls and snoring, she said it would be different when we got to City Island and I would meet girls there I would feel differently about. She said sisters were one thing but other girls were another. So I was reserving my judgement on that score and was waiting to see what these other girls might be like, and as far as I was concerned, they were innocent until proven guilty. But if they were going to tell me they never snored, I wouldn't believe them. As I'd already had experience.

Well, I took a drink of water and I put the telescope back to my eye. There were a few sky-fish around and some small sky-jellies, but they were the harmless ones that weren't going to bother you. I raised the scope a little and looked above us. There, in the distance, I could make something out. It was still small, but it was moving, and it was coming our way. I kept the scope trained on it and tightened the focus a little. Then I prodded Gemma with my foot and I shook Peggy by the arm.

‘Something coming,' I said. ‘Something funny-looking.'

And it
was
funny-looking too. It was weird. The shape of it was wrong. It couldn't be a sky-fish. I knew what they looked like. I knew every kind and variety that lived up at our level, and even the names of some of the leathery ones from down below that we had hauled up sometimes on great long lines.

Gemma stretched and stood up and Peggy did the same, but she took a little longer and she creaked more.

‘Let me see, Martin –' Peggy said.

I handed her the scope.

‘It looks a bit like a sky-fin, but if it is, there's something else with it …'

Peggy held the scope to her eye and then passed the scope to Gemma.

‘What do you think?'

‘It's a rider.'

Gemma handed the scope back to me.

‘It's a what?' I said.

I looked again. I'd never seen anything like this. She was right – there was a rider on the back of the sky-fin. The sky-fin was saddled and bridled and somehow broken in and tamed, and the rider was using it as private transport, and the mount was speeding him through the sky.

‘I knew they were friendly but I thought they were wild. I didn't know you could tame them.'

‘If you're got the patience – and the determination – and don't mind getting a few bites and tail slaps along the way,' Peggy said. ‘Or you can whisper them, if you have the gift.'

‘Whisper them?'

‘Persuade them and cajole them – with sweet nothings in their ears. You don't need whips and spurs when you've got sweet nothings and you know how to say them. Just brings them round and calms them down. But you have to have the knack. Cloud Hunters do it.'

‘That a Cloud Hunter?'

‘If it is, it's a lost and lonely one. They don't usually travel alone.'

The sky-fin and its rider were heading across our path at fifty degrees. But then abruptly the rider seemed to see us, for he jerked at the bridle and turned the sky-fin around, and he began to head in our direction.

‘Looks like he wants some company,' Peggy said. She took the telescope back. ‘I wonder …' She put the lens to her eye, seemed to stiffen, then, ‘Gemma,' she said. ‘Go down to the cabin, get my knife and bring it to me.'

Gemma didn't question her and nor did I, and I made out like I wasn't worried neither, but I was. What had Peggy seen about the rider that she wanted her knife for?

‘Can't we just change course?' Gemma said. She was back with the knife and the sheath it came in. Peggy hooked it to her belt.

‘Wouldn't be any good,' Peggy said. ‘A sky-fin, even with extra weight on its back, is going to outrun you easy. Let's just see what he wants. Might all be fine. Why look for trouble?'

She put the telescope down. As Gemma didn't pick it up again, I did. I could see them both clearly now, the sky-fin and the rider. He didn't look much older than Gemma to me, but he looked kind of strange, kind of blank, like there wasn't much going on in his mind – or if there was, he was determined to keep it all to himself.