The Dream Vessel (19 page)

Big Tom grabbed the sailor by the collar and slung him overboard, dangling him carefully until his toes touched the shaft of the harpoon. Stitches along the shoulders of the young man’s shirt began to burst—phitt, phitt, phitt—until he put his full weight on the protruding Rafer missile.

“Slash it, boy!” Big Tom howled. “Cut the poker now!”

Two more blooms of smoke appeared over the Rafer attack vessel. Two more explosions. And two more many-barbed missiles struck the Nina—one biting into the bow and the other slamming the young sailor Fenton square in the chest. The barbed tip exploded through the wood wall and forced a small gusher of blood and flesh between Big Tom’s legs. Pinned to the ship’s hull, Fenton’s body went limp, and Big Tom slowly released his collar.

The black fin of a feeder beast sliced through the rush of water several feet below the dead sailor. Teased by the torrent of human blood.

At 100 yards, the dark sailors aboard the Rafer skimmer were easily visible now, teams of two cranking at either side of large cable spools, others somersaulting and spinning about the curved decking like crazed crickets.

When the three dripping hemplines rose from the water and grew taut, Big Tom’s belly tightened too. Over each hempline he witnessed a whirling blur of motion, and instantly three Rafers were clinging to the starboard rail of the Nina—two men, one woman, all slender and naked but for the weapons strapped to their limbs and torsos. Oddly, through his horror, Big Tom found himself admiring the arrangement of blades and tosser disks about their bodies—how they formed a kind of patchwork armor.

An explosion on deck shattered the momentary standoff. A half-moon-shaped piece of the starboard rail vanished into splinters, and the Rafer who had perched there fell overboard in a shower of red mist. Fel Guinness stood at the aft hatch, both barrels of his snubgun smoking. The remaining Rafers whirled their arms, and tosser disks caught Guinness in the throat and forehead. He gurgled and keeled over.

“No!” screamed Gregory, springing to the starboard side. Teasing the edges of his memory were images of a nurturing people who had pulled him from the sinking Lucia. “We don’t know what the Rafers want!”

The tense silence lasted barely two seconds before three more Rafers—a total of five now—appeared on the rail as if by magic. As the decksmen backed away, two Rafers set about dismantling the cannons.

“We knows wat they want,” growled Bark from the pilot’s deck. “They wants our willies dangling from their necks!”

The towering first mate drew his thigh blade. Before he could throw, a disk splashed into his hand.

From below, Gregory saw three fingertips thump to the deck at Bark’s feet, and his hope of averting a bloodbath evaporated. The first mate’s throaty howl seemed to be the starting gun that set in motion a surreal circus of terror.

Hemp lines from two more Rafer skimmers slammed into the Nina, and the lithe little warriors whirled aboard by the dozens. The large ship’s timbers were groaning now from the unnatural pull of the cables. The Rafers wheeled invisibly about the new decking and swarmed through the rigging above. All around Gregory, the new Government’s panicking seamen were collapsing, felled by an enemy they could barely see. A few more banger blasts were fired, but those weapons quickly clattered to the deck.

Gregory thought to bolt into a Rafer spin himself, but he knew such a defense would be a laughable effort. Besides, where could he dart off to—where was there to hide? He longed for open land, or the protection of a forest. If he was to die amid this flailing carnage, well, he must die. He was trapped.

Gregory straightened his spine and walked soberly back to Jersey Saple, who was cowering in the shadow of his beloved sun reader. When he touched the old man’s shoulder, the journalist squealed.

“It’s juss me, Jersey,” Gregory said, pulling him to a stand.

Saple’s sightless eyes darted about maniacally. He shuddered. “It sounds like…a slaughter.”

“But you know Rafer. Say something to them.” Gregory squeezed his arm. “You know the pig-pokin’ tongue. Say something! Stop it!”

Saple seemed to collect himself. He thrust both thumbs into the front of his trousers and lifted his scraggly chin to sing. His words were incomprehensible to Gregory, but they were cool and high-pitched, slicing easily through the clatter of battle and the blood-splashed sails. Gregory had heard the Rafer tongue many times, but never had it sounded like this.

“It’s a nursery rhyme, taught ta me by Billister,” the journalist said when he was finished. “About Big Bang Day—the Fungus People bringing destruction upon themselves.”

“Great selection.”

“It’s the only song I know. In Rafer.”

“Sing it again,” Gregory demanded. “Look, they’re listening.”

“Hmmph. Ya. So I see,” he replied sarcastically. But he sang again anyway.

The whirling dark soldiers did slowly come to a stop—some agrip in the high rigging, others busy hauling lifeless bodies up from below decks. They gawked at the spectacle of an old Fungus Person singing a song of their children. Gregory’s vision began to tear up as he gazed in shock around the deck, for clearly the battle was already over. There were few lives left to save. The new Government’s expedition was a disaster, although it had scarcely begun.

The Rafers had collapsed all of the Nina’s sails to reduce her speed, but oddly they had left all of the rigging intact and did not seem intent on scuttling the massive vessel. Fore and aft, Gregory heard the metallic whump-and-rattle of the anchors being released, and soon all nine of the Rafer skimmers were lashed alongside.

Saple stopped singing when there came a commotion from the aft hatch. Gregory, not daring to move, watched as a trio of Rafers hauled Big Tom up out of the darkness. He was growling nonsensically and drooling into his beard, hands tied behind him and feet bound as well.

The Cantilou climbed up the hatch ladder, squinting in the bright light, and stepped haughtily over the writhing captain. The feline’s boy-face fixed immediately on Gregory and Saple, and he sauntered across the deck, tail flipping. The Rafers were gaping at the fabled beast with awe and respect.

“Oh, hell, Gregory,” came the Cantilou’s voice, although the dainty lips never moved, “they all know me—or my ancestors anyway—through their legends.”

“Who…who is that?” stammered Saple. He was hearing the voice too.

“A booger the likes of which you wouldn’t believe,” Gregory mumbled to him. “I think it’s a beast what’s had its claws sunk into Big Tom’s mind for some time.”

“And you would be Jersey Saple,” came the Cantilou’s keening voice again. “Is it true that you know languages? Several of them, including Rafer?”

The old man tugged at the canvas of his sun reader. “Ya,” he said uncomfortably. “That is so.”

“Then you will be of much use to me. And you, Gregory—you as well. You will be put to good work. It was not coincidence that you escaped the blades and disks during the Rafer attack. But for the moment, you will excuse me while I attend to a detail of cleanup before we embark.”

“Cantilou,” Gregory said after him sternly. The cat-boy craned its supple neck around to look at him. “Did they all have to die?” Gregory asked.

The Cantilou’s eyes glowed red for a moment, and the telepathic reply came, measured and menacing: “They did not all die, Gregory, but that can be corrected.”

The cat-boy swaggered toward the stern. When Gregory turned to ask, “What possible use…”—there she was. More muscled that he remembered. Handsomely strapped, arm and leg, in the deadly brass disks she had once had little use for—a few of them missing, flung in battle.

Tym. So she had ordered that he be spared. It would not be that difficult—do not whack the yellow-haired man with the Rafer tattoo.

She broke into the wide smile that had been haunting him for months. An animal lust welled up in him that he knew to be the dangerous, unquestioning devotion of the half-wit that he no longer was. She approached, placed a gentle fingertip on his quivering lip, and then let it slide down to toy with his neck and the tattoo work that had been carefully needled into his skin by one of her tribesmen.

“Gragi,” she said.

She pulled at his arm and led him to the aft hatch, stepping carefully around the snarling captain hamstrung there.

Gregory stepped onto the hatch ladder and turned, shock-numb, still feeling knee-deep in the fresh slaughter, the crumpled bodies of Bark, Widekilter, Guinness, Bishop and—oh, gawd—poor H. Fenstemacher Lapp. The Rafers were already swabbing the deck to sparkling again. Bodies were being hefted overboard, Rafer and Fungus Person alike, to the delight of a growing pool of feeder beasts.

Big Tom, tied there amid the thickening dashes of blood, was bug-eyed with red fury as he struggled against the leather bindings. Gregory knew he would not see the old slaver again.

“If it makes you feel any better, Big Tom…Moori, she warn’t coming back. Shacked up with some clothier in Chautown—underwear salesman, or some such.” Gregory continued down the hatch ladder, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, waiting for his soul to adjust to the sickening mixture of horror and joy, and wondering which cabin they would use.

When the Nina got underway again, she was set at half sail, with a new crew. At the stern, a Rafer crewman fastened a twenty-five-yard hempline to the rail and its other end he wound around Big Tom’s ankles.

“I’d de-ball ya, ugly li’l red-legger, if I was juss to get a pinkie free,” Big Tom told the uncomprehending sailor.

The Cantilou and Jersey Saple had heard enough of the insults and now managed to ignore them. “Pec-Pec?” asked the Cantilou. His tail switched left and right. “Well, no, Mr. Saple. On the one hand, you could say he was quite aware of what would happen—or should happen. Near omniscience such as his does have its drawbacks. But on the other hand, it could not be said that he arranged any of this—the loss of the Government ship. No. You see, he’s already quite mortified at the degree of involvement he’s had with the matters of Fungus People. He finds very little pleasure now in helping or hindering them. As you know, he’s done both….”

Saple held a large pad of paper in one hand and pecked notes onto it with a sharp stylus. “Ah. So. Then perhaps you could explain…uh, that splash overboard juss now—would that have been Big Tom?”

“Quite right.”

“Ah.” There was a short pause in which the blind writer tried to imagine a portly form bobbing through the waves. “Looking to the voyage ahead, then, perhaps you could explain why a few dozen Rafers and their little escort ships would care to sail to Europe.”

Saple heard a soft laugh. “Oh, we will simply be the new emissaries. The Rafers will be the ones to find what’s left of the old civilizations across the Big Ocean. But Europe? If there’s time, if there’s little enough radiation. But I thought we would begin with what you call ‘the country of Africa.’”

“Ah. I am told now that our maps show it to be quite a large continent.”

“A gigantic one. And we should start in the north, I think.” Saple heard the cat-boy’s tail whapping the deck. “Wouldn’t it be nice to stop and see the Sphinx?”

Sunreader dotscript

Portfolio 23

Page 13

Jersey Saple

On we sail into gawd knows what.

This matter of the Cantilou is a knot of bollworms. Being a Fungus Person, as the Rafers call men of my kind, I suppose that I am not meant to gully this to the bottom. But it dawns on me now that the Rafers are not the first civilization to have hybrid human-cats slinking a crooked path through their histories. They were known even to those people what the ancients called ancient.

But the Rafers take ownership of the Cantilou, for better or for worse. They do not seem to regard him as the most joyous of beasts to have in their midst—most written references in the Rafer histories portray him, at best, as a sort of troublesome satyr. At worst, a horror. But still they hailed his appearance at their sea attack with a sort of morbid glee.

Tym, the new mate of Gregory, offered an oblique explanation. She described for me the sea roiling with the fins of feeder beasts, where once there had been the wriggling body of Big Tom. “They may be feeder beasts,” she said in the Rafer tongue, “but at this moment they do our work. Fear only the beast that has come for you—the one that smells your blood.”

We are a week at sail now, and the Rafer crew is as comfortable with the Nina as a wine sluggard is with his bed of old blankets. The feeder beasts have fallen away. All crew are anxious for sight of new land.

I saw a whale today—not by actual sight, as you would know, but by the sensory gift that I am blessed with. It came alongside the Nina, a breathing behemoth a quarter the length of the ship itself. And then came another and another crashing to the surface, an entire herd snorting and lolling in the waves. They are virtually unknown in the waters of the Out Islands, more storied than encountered.

Today it seemed that my blindsight developed to a new level. Or perhaps there is just more now to be seen than ever before. For I sensed in a rush all of the new waters around us quaking with life, a vibrance unknown to the seas of Merqua. And I came to the belief, haltingly, that we had entered a new land and a life system distinct from our own.

There is a continent beyond. I know this. I can feel it as surely as I feel the stylus between my old fingers. Centuries back, it was seared and blistered and scarred in the terrible war as we thought it must have been, and now it has healed over in ways strange to all of us.

Herewith I close out a tale scripted in a dot writing that mayhap no man will ever read. With my next clean parchment I begin Portfolio 24. I will take it up on a new land, at the beginning of a new history.

I and all aboard are in reasonable physical health. The Cantilou has occupied the captain’s quarters, which reeks these days of the acrid odor of manure. The Rafer food is foreign but palatable—heavy with spicy vegetables and meats stewed in preserving brine.

A final note: It is for Gregory’s health of mind that I fear most. What time he does not spend below decks with his beloved Tym he passes clinging to the battle-splintered section of the starboard rail. He is drawn to the gray-green waters by visions to which no others are privileged, sighted or otherwise. He stares blankly into the waves, nodding and chuckling to himself over and over a madman’s punchline:

“Here be monsters.”