Pec-Pec’s face furrowed with a frown. “Don’t shout at me! You are the one that sent the letter—three copies did you say?”
“How many know?”
“Dozens, maybe. I found just one copy—bought it at a flea market in South-of-the-Bend after it was read aloud at auction. A warehouser’s assistant had found it, was selling it as an amusement, a comedy. You can’t blame him for thinking it a fiction….”
“It’s all true—well, mostly, the nut of it is. Parts, anyway. If I had a way of helping Nora Londi, I would do that. I know where she is now—Blue Hole. Huh. No one returns.”
“But there is more, no?” Pec-Pec’s voice was growing scornful. “Perhaps there is a restless younger here, a lifetime log-camp boy who would like to see those sprawling sectors that the travelers tell of? And perhaps this younger thinks he is going to pound a Badger to settle a hard score, and he needs money to bolt with? Hoo, well. No one’s going to send money and maps for that, are they?”
Takk was reddening even more as he buttoned his shirt. “Why don’t you get your own damned room? I might have killed ya—or died of a heart banger. And where’s Moberly?”
“Moberly, dear Moberly, has been up for hours. She works alone, you know, and the travelers are starting to arrive. As for the other question—well, you don’t expect me to pay for my own room, do you? Not when I could share a bunk with my new companion. A companion who has come into sudden wealth!”
“Oh, ya, ‘new companion,’ is it? No, this I am doing alone. I do not need some … some traveling circus to draw attention to me. And I don’t have any money—nothing to kill for, anyway.”
Pec-Pec tossed the sheet aside and stood. He was fully dressed: denim trousers, boots, a blousy dark shirt run through with random red and gold threads. The magic man’s face was grim. “Anton Takk,” he said, “you could not have done a better job of drawing attention to yourself. I was not going to show myself to you at all, but now we have an emergency. You are about to be found, and there are more important things for you to do than die here.”
Takk pointed the knife at Pec-Pec’s flared nose. “I don’ want to do anything. I want to be where no one knows me, is all. Maybe with your ‘un-Governments’—where are they?”
“You will meet them, where we’re going, when we do what needs doing.”
“What’s this what needs doin’?”
Pec-Pec’s eyes widened. “Oh! Well, I don’t know yet.”
Takk sniffed. “I’ve known a few dark-fleshed men, up Camp Blade. Seen more in New Chicago. You ain’t like any of ‘em. You’re not a natural bowl of beans, are ya?”
Pec-Pec tapped at his lips pensively with two fingers. “How much of the truth can you stand?” he asked.
“The truth that’s, well, the truth—let’s have all of that.”
“Ah, all of the truth,” Pec-Pec said, settling back onto the bed. He leaned into a pillow and put his feet up. “Let’s see. Born in the Southlands, not far from the Big Ocean. Keep a home sometimes in the Out Islands, although I travel about mostly. I lend assist to the Rafers when I can, as your Government is not the most understanding…”
“Ho, the Rafers! Savages?”
“Umm. They wouldn’t think much of you either, I ‘spect.”
“But they file their teeth to a point, the better to eat babies, run ‘round naked—”
Pec-Pec was waving his hand in the air. “I see this will take more time than we have here. But I must say to you a little about the Rafers. You know of the firebombs what landed in the Big War. Well, the radiation fields burn so strong for the first several decades that hunnerds—hoo—thousands of Southlanders were cut away from the population to which you were born. People known as blacks, Indians, Cajuns. Even a race called Texans. Now they are all Rafers.
“They don’ gully your concept of ownership of territory. Huh. Their tribes prefer the distant lands, far from Government and its bangers—the plains, the Out Islands….”
Takk was frowning. He scratched under his beard. Resigned, he nailed the knife into the dresser top, but stayed within reach. “Stop. Ho, you jabber on. I’m thinking of here and now, an’ thass most of what I can care about. Here and now I … I … just … want … to disappear.”
“Ya, okay.” Pec-Pec was whispering now. “But not like your father disappeared. Not like that.”
Moberly had sounded equally worried about Government pursuers.
“I don’t suppose I can go back,” Takk said. The ale, from hours before, smacked sour in his mouth now. “Not after I pounded a Badger. Hah. I wouldn’t mind, I think, just staying here. Moberly—ach, I like her. But I don’t suppose I can do that either.”
“No,” Pec-Pec said. “I don’t suppose.”
Takk doused the lamp and went to the window. Now there was yet another Supply truck, smaller than his, parked by the barn. Far away in the house a man was singing. It sounded like a spiritual.
[Back to Table of Contents]
14
The Inventor
“Damn lightning!”
Cred Faiging’s tongue still smoldered with that coppery taste of flash fear—a nearby lightning strike, perhaps a death blow to the aging oak on the hilltop. He threw a pair of needle-nosed pliers onto the workbench and backed away from the electrical contraption he was building. It was an instinctive motion, animalistic and (he admitted to himself) entirely too late had there been any real danger. It was absurd, too, considering the sophisticated web of lightning rods protecting the five acres of compound. No man understood the mysteries of electricity like Cred Faiging, and he was determined it would not get the better of him.
Kim pushed through the plywood spring-door to the workshop, her odor preceding her by several yards. Her denims hugged across bony hips and the holster and bandolier criss-crossing her shoulders clicked softly as she shuffled to the bench to study Faiging’s progress.
“Taking a break, yes?” she asked, oblivious of the new storm. “What’s it this time? Torturing more plant fibers with the electrodes?” Mounted on the bench was a footlong, tight coil of metal tubing valved to a freon cannister, a treasure he had bought for a few centimes from ignorant salvagers. Around the tubing wound a second coil, this one of electrical wire.
“No,” replied the sallow inventor. He swept back his thinning hair, feeling his nerves shake down to normal. He sighed. “No fibers today. I’ve about run dry of permutations until I get some new plant buggers. This construction … well, I was wondering about the effect of sharp changes of temperature on magnetic fields.”
Kim clucked and rolled a tobacco wad off her tongue into her left cheek. “Electromagnetism! Huh—dat legal this year?”
“Oh, bugger me,” Faiging said, joining her mocking tone. “Bugger me up the canal if I should ever invoke a force of nature declared ullegal or nonexistent!” He retrieved the pliers and dispensed with the jest. “You member the April contract, don’t you? A dozen sump pumps for some Southland project—a dozen electric motors, ordered up by the Government. Guess that makes ‘em legal—no?—legal till they’re ordered undone again. Legal, legal, legal.”
“Do ya idea that enough to keep the Inspectors packed away with their dynamite when they come round next? Ha. They’ll have yer balls for brekkie.”
“Huh. They need to keep my balls happy.”
“There are a five or dozen dispatches you haven’t opened even from last week,” Kim admonished.
“I don’t want to know yet. Let me finish.”
“And a couple of trekkers are waiting down ta the gate….”
“Poke ‘em.”
“Old one said to give the name Rosenthal Webb. A young one with him, soft ‘n’ nervous.”
Faiging wore a sour look. “Ya don’t gully the name Webb? A danger to talk to, if the Government hears of it. You’ve seen ‘em, here onceta year maybe—usually for the warm stuff. Bangers, wire, out-region maps. Old poker. Missing a few pointers on his right hand, did ya see? Is it him?” Faiging
held up a hand to demonstrate. The tops of his fingers were folded in, hidden, leaving four nubs.
Kim was scratching, bored. “I juss box the gear for ‘em, I don’ take their measurements.”
“Well, let them in,” Faiging said, “before the lightning Q’s ‘em. The young ‘un wears a snap collar, or he stays outside. No talk.”
Faiging worried over a dubiously soldered connection until Webb pushed through the door. The revolutionary’s jumpsuit hung dirty and loose, like the skin of a boiled tomato. He wore a dark-colored backpack. His boots were muddy, hard leather, punctuated by canvas vents that were designed to lighten the weight and provide air to the feet.
Webb limped in, silently cursing the storm and its crippling humidity. “Gregory’s coming in behind me,” Webb said stonily, “and he ain’t wearing a poking snap collar.”
Faiging looked up.
“The snapper, thass too scary even for me,” Webb said. “But Gregory’s stripped clean. Kim agreed to that fast enough.”
The young man entered, muscle-hard but pink-skinned naked and embarrassed. Kim loped in after him, mercifully pretending not to notice, and handed a supply list to Faiging.
The young man was anything but swaggering in his nudity. His shoulders hunched forward, bringing his arms into a frontward dangle that he hoped, futilely, might cover his crotch. “I’m … my name’s Gregory. You’re Mr. Faiging? The one what makes the generators and wenches … winches?” He blushed.
Faiging chuckled, amused that this was the sideman he had been so wary of. “I am Cred Faiging, yes,” he said politely. “And, well, I designed those things and many more. It’s the mountain grunts that actually make them now—out in the assembly houses. You could say that the trade we take from those frees me to play at more interesting pursuits.”
The old inventor-trader recognized the wide-eyed awe of a fan. He poked his pliers in the direction of the newly formed tubing on the bench. “Now, it sounds that you was brought up right—with Faiging machinery about ya, no?”
“Plumb right, Mister,” Gregory replied eagerly, and Webb winced that his assistant could be so easily toyed with. “I grew up on the saying ‘If it ain’t Faiging, don’t trust your life to it.’”
Faiging nodded reverently—he had heard the same hundreds of times and never tired of it. The inventor returned to his new experiment, snipping the questionable solder connection apart and starting it anew.
“Son, it’s juss the way of progress, thass all,” Faiging said, eyes on his project. “Since the dawn of man—” He stopped himself. “Well, since the Big War, anyway, it’s juss been the way of the world. Some rad-scarred salvager will find a rusted piece of ancient junk an’ haul it in and sell it to an inventor, scientist, repairman, artist—call us anything you want.”
Faiging waved his pliers grandly. “Thass the way the modern world was built. Reconstructed wire by wire, gear by gear—by myself and a handful of the like-minded.”
Webb was growing impatient. “I have a supply list, and a tanker van to fill,” he said.
Faiging did not look up. “Kim can take care of all that, as you know,” he mumbled. “Why is it for once you cannot take supply quietly and pass on to do your maiming? Ya must parade into the main shop so that all know Cred Faiging supplies the enemies of the Government? Every time it’s this way!”
Webb snorted. “You’re a trader,” he said, “a trader of all things and a player of all sides. And any customer you have is plumby enough to know that. Last I knew, you were no more a Government man than you were a fish peddler.”
“That may be, but on touchy matters the Monitor is not much for forgiving.”
“I’m headed out again,” Webb said seriously, “into a thick bollocks I don’t gully to the bottom. But on the edges of everything, is this odd bugger—a man you connected me with a year ago.”
Faiging nodded. “Pec-Pec, the magic man. Don’t hope to gully that one. You trade your nasty secrets with a bugger like that, now you’re part of his crazy world—a story writ by a madman.”
“Your machinery is solid,” Webb said, “and that I trust with my life, as they say. Your odd friends I don’t. I have to know more.”
Faiging paused with thought, then regarded the shivering young Gregory. He said to Kim, “The buster needs a covering. Bring ‘im a blanket—not his gear, gully, just a blanket. One of our blankets.” When Kim returned, Gregory settled onto a stool with the wool covering about him, more thankful to be able to cover his nakedness than to ward off the chill.
Faiging began with a slow but impatient air, as if addressing dull schoolchildren. “I want to make a test of something,” the inventor said, “and mayhap you will see my point. Now, Gregory, answer me this: Who is the Monitor?”
The young man glanced to Webb, his brow wrinkling. “Who? The Monitor?”
Faiging was steadfast in his patience. “Just say what you truly believe,” Faiging said flatly. “Tell me like I was just born—who is the Monitor, what does he do, where is he, and what does he look like?”
“Aww, nobody gots the whole of it, so what’s the point?”
The old man put a foot on the lowest rung of Gregory’s stool. “If you made your best guess, then,” Faiging pressed on. “If you had to say the likest thing, what would it be?”
“I’d say the obvious, what ain’t left to speculation….”
“Which is?”
“Which is…” Gregory sighed. “The Monitor runs the Government, which is based in New Chicago. The Monitor probably lives there himself, by reason, and things operate rather smoothly—you’re housed, get a roof and work and all—until one day you’re informed by some pig-poking Lunch Minister or some such that cod guts are a delicacy and will be eaten raw at midday until supplies run out….”
“The Monitor?”
“The Monitor,” Gregory repeated, willing to be led back to the subject, away from his tirade. “He is a large, old mutated man. Secretive. The schoolchild tale is that he has three heads, heads like a dog or a bull, and lives in a hole in the ground, afraid of the light. Grew up in a science library, or some such.”
Faiging held up a hand, signaling for Gregory to stop. He motioned to Webb, saying, “Your turn. The Monitor—whatever you truly believe.”
Webb’s eyes darted to the window. Despite the storm, he clearly wanted to leave and be on the road. “This is stupid,” Webb said. “So little is really known about the Monitor and what’s to be had is probably more myth than fact. But for my part, I don’t believe the Monitor’s in New Chicago—haven’t thought that for years—and he’s not an individual, but a consortium of bungholes holed up far from the city. Three separate, normal individuals maybe, thus the three-headed tale.”
Faiging leaned contentedly into his workbench. “Yes,” he said, “the point is that all those with the true gut-ball information are either in power or dead. The Monitor could be anything from a three-headed monster in New Chicago to a paranoid committee that relocates itself every few months in the countryside.”
“I was asking you about Pec-Pec,” said Webb.
“And I was illustrating just that,” replied Faiging. “No one knows anything about Pec-Pec just like no one knows anything about the Monitor. The Monitor runs a government that has precise rules, and those who do not obey die or disappear. Pec-Pec—he cannot be found either. He cannot be described accurately, and his existence is just a matter of faith. He is known as a gentleman, a statesman, a magician, and a thief. Probably there are four or five Pec-Pecs as well. The one I introduced you to, I just cannot be responsible for. Gully? If he leads you to disaster with one of his fantasies, don’t come bombing my compound in revenge. I just introduced you once. Now, I’ve tried to warn ya away.”
“We wouldn’t bomb you, Mr. Faiging,” Gregory said innocently. “The committee’s ordered a peaceful mission—no bangers. It wouldn’t have let us come, otherwise.”
Faiging’s smile twisted, and he held up the order sheet Kim had passe
d to him. “Then ya haven’t seen your boss’s supply list, have ya, boy?”
[Back to Table of Contents]
15
Rutherford Cross
There was not much about old Rutherford Cross that his neighbors agreed on. But this much no one would dispute: He owned eighty acres of land on the outskirts of Kingstree in the Sector that was called back then South Carolina. The earth was rich enough (although a might sandy), but he farmed only a small patch measuring eight rows by a hundred feet—corn, cabbage, rutabagas, string beans. He had no teeth—had never had any in anyone’s memory—and his leathery face resembled a collapsing jack-o-lantern. Not a trace of paint remained on his shack, which stood among towering oaks hung with Spanish moss in the center of his property. Most neighbors speculated that he owned so much land just so that no one would have any business coming near him.
Grammy Baker, who had never lived more than a couple of miles from Cross, swore that he had looked precisely the same when she was a little girl 70-odd years before. It was even gossiped that he was 250 years old and had come from Africa himself on a slave boat—a notion that the younger folks poo-pooed, of course.
Sam Weathers, who delivered dry goods to Cross’s house on the first of each month (unless it fell on a Sunday), had heard Cross say once that he was on his seventh wife—Lydia—and the courthouse records did show four legal marriages under his name, the first one being to Melissa Bailey in 1904.
Children? Strangely, nobody quite knew, but skeptics reckoned that there had been two Rutherford Crosses, father and son, and that the distinction between the two had blurred—thus accounting for his unnatural life span.
Cross was held in high esteem when it came to doctoring. He could set a broken bone, cure a fever, and had delivered dozens of babies with Lydia’s help. The Clinic doctors, the kind with framed diplomas on the wall, would get pretty hot about that. But mention such things as “voodoo” or “mojo” or “medicine bag” to Cross and he was as likely as anyone to roll his eyes and spit out a spiteful “Pshaw.”
The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] Page 6
