"Yes."
"Put a scare into the Repho, didn't you? Too bad they're back stronger than ever with that Kupertini douchebag out of the Democravian state. What does he call it, the Union of Constipated Bastards?"
"I don't know. I just want to live a normal life."
"No such thing anymore, Corrag. You could lay low with us on the boat for awhile, but we're scheduled to deliver you over to Montaquila's crowd."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do you do this?"
"Money. A life. Everyone has to fight their corner. I don't trust the Repho. I don't trust the rebels. Anybody who pays me, I trust them until the job is over. When we sail out of port, out of sight out of mind, as far as I'm concerned. And the blue water is still a haven for the lawless."
"What about the Augment?"
"What about it? Not for me or Beth. I don't have anything against it on moral grounds, just hasn't got good enough. Some day, when it's right, I might get it done. I might care about living forever some day. Right now I like living every day as if it was my last. More fun that way."
Oddgeir cracked the hatch open and shouted some words that she couldn't hear. Bob followed up the ladder, and when he came back down he ordered Corrag up.
"Get into the bunk and pretend you're asleep with the baby.
"What is it?"
"Repho coast guard cutter. You're my daughter and we lost your emosponder."
Corrag did as she was told, skirting into the bunks forward of the hold, with Arthur in one arm, his head slumped in exhaustion. She got into the berth and pulled the blankets over herself and Arthur. It was cold. Arthur nuzzled into her side, seeking warmth. And the boat popped and swayed, breaking the waves with its bow. She could sense them slowing, falling back. The pounding of the water against the hull grew louder. She closed her eyes. If this was the belly of the whale, she would one day wake up and there would be sunlight and warmth. She just needed to hold on a little longer. It wasn't, strangely, in God that she trusted. It was in Arthur. His presence by her side was all she needed to feel calm. Not that she could keep him safe if there was a danger of being captured and returned to the Nenkaja. Only she couldn't even think of that as a reality. She listened hard, and when she didn't hear anything except the constant reverberations of the muffled water she fell asleep.
Marina handed her the whale carved out of bone. It was morning. The sensors were ringing in the chapel offices, and when she turned her head she could see Alana disappearing around the corner and up the entrance ramp for the disabled. The prisoners were running from the shed and scattering and the guards were doing nothing about it. Corrag walked up to Marion Muslkick and asked her why she was doing nothing to prevent the prisoners from escaping. The Nenkaja would disappear if all the prisoners escaped, just evaporate into the mists that were rising all around from the swampy ground. Muslkick pulled off her shirt and freed her large breasts and began to dance. She was crazy, and the Nenkaja could disappear and take them all up into thin air with it. Corrag went inside the chapel offices and saw Alana with Kevin. Kevin was asking Alana if he could marry her, but then Dr. Juarez-Knoblock intervened and announced new quotas for the log cutting.
"But it's summer," said Marion Muslkick.
"Put your shirt on and get back to work," said Juarez-Knoblock. It was too late to do anything about all the escaped prisoners. Corrag wondered if it was really Alana who had disappeared back outside. Muslkick refused orders and all the remaining people in the chapel offices, Corrag included, began to sing Morning Has Broken. She wondered if it was Alana and what she wanted. Was she escaping? Would she make it? Kevin stood there looking brave and maintaining a guarded silence. Corrag felt guilty about him and wanted to hug him and somehow urge him up into a higher level of participation, but his best days were behind him as was true for everyone she knew.
Then she was on a carousel and Ricky was standing at the fence watching her as the carousel spun. She was holding tight to the reins of the pony as it bucked slowly up and down. She was wearing a dress, a light blue dress that Alana had bought at a yard sale in Petaluma. There were still yard sales in those days and people's funerals. As the carousel spun and the pony bucked, the music playing was Fire to the Rain, an old song Alana used to sing to her when she was just a baby. She remembered. The carousel stopped. Corrag dismounted from the pony and she straightened her blue dress and looked around for Ricky. He was gone. Everyone was gone. There was just an empty beach and a man at the end of the sand holding up a dead fish that had washed up in the storms. She could smell the salt air, and it was wet, raining, and she had nowhere to go. She began to run. Her feet were stuck in the wet muck, and it took all of her strength to get them to move. Then the waves began to strike the beach with greater strength, and she could hear the rumble of thunder. The man was still there. At the end of the beach. With a pile of dead fish he had collected. She was coming closer and she could almost see his face. But the sand was sucking at her feet. It was getting harder and harder to run. She willed her legs to move faster, push harder, and her heart was beating so fast it hurt her chest. But the man wanted to show her something. About the fish. They were all dead, lying on the wet sand and rotting. Something had poisoned them. But she would never know what it was because he would fade away. Always fade away before she got back to him.
She woke up. It was Ricky's dream. She shook her head. This was not a dream. The boat was pitching violently, and she could hear the wind whistling somewhere. Someone had left the hatch open. She decided to get up and leave Arthur asleep. She piled the pillows and blankets between him and the rail on the bunk so he wouldn't roll out. She staggered along the passage, and there was nobody in the galley and the hatch to the pilothouse was open. She climbed the ladder. The wind was deafening. The stars were whirling in the sky, and the boat was bucking up to them like a wild horse. The light from the pilothouse revealed the hulking waves all around, their skins crabbed and frothing from the wind.
""Forty knot winds astern," yelled Beth. "Nor'easter. We'll ride it out and take turns on watch. You have time before it’s your turn."
"But all of you are up here."
"We're reefing the sail. Once that's done we'll be okay."
Bob yelled at Oddgeir, who was working on getting the mainsail down and reefed. He held onto the boom for dear life as the waves crashed over the hull, threatening to sweep them all away. Beth shone a flashlight on him, and he wore a headlamp. A massive wave rose beside them and pushed the boat up in the air and set it back down almost on its side. Bob spun the wheel inside the house, adjusting the track manually to fight the water's takedown. Corrag couldn't help it. She ducked inside and fell back down the ladder, not without taking a spray of icy cold water all over herself. Oddgeir looked down after her and laughed when he saw her sprawled in the galley as pots gimbaled cockily on the stove.
"Give her a hand, Oddgeir," said Bob.
With a swift jump and holding onto the map table, he reached her as she tried to stand and extended his hand for support. She was glad to take it, suddenly feeling sick.
"You look like you could use some coffee."
"No thanks."
"This is really good. Try it."
Oddgeir took one of the pots off the stove and poured some of its contents into a mug with the name of a Parisian kebab house, Le Sanctuaire de Baal, and handed it to Corrag, who had stayed seated on the sole. Corrag took it gingerly, unsure of releasing her hold, and sipped it, slobbering a bit onto her shirt. It tasted of spices, cinnamon, and a hint of garlic.
"I don't want to be sick."
"Don't think about it if you do. It's good. Even the best sailors get sick on this passage."
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"You seem really young."
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
"You're not much older."
"No, not much."
"You know how old Bob is?"
"I'd guess forty f
ive."
"Fifty-seven. Beth is thirty-five. They've sailed around the freaking world seven times."
"Really?"
"Yeah. We did the Suez Canal and around the Horn this summer and back up to Europe. We specialize in the trade of ideas. That's what Bob says."
"Oh."
Oddgeir's eyes were making Corrag feel even worse. They were impossible to focus into, small slits of hazel. She wondered if he was a part of her dream, the man with the fish. She decided to share it with him and see. If he was a dream, he would recognize the man and be able to tell her who it was.
"Do you believe in dreams?"
"Lucid or what?"
"No, I mean, am I dreaming right now."
"No this is real. I know what you're feeling though. My first trip with Bob I was so sleep-deprived. It was sick."
"Where are you from?"
"Me? I'm from Grindavik, Iceland."
"I'm from Edmundstown. Democravia. Do you miss your family?"
"Yes. But this is life. You have to apprentice to something."
"I don't know. When I get old I want to live someplace quiet and nice with a picket fence, but not washed away. Someplace warm and far from the ocean."
"The desert. You should check out Namibia. It's really nice and there are some cool people living there."
"You have been all over."
At that moment the sickness snuck up and hit her. As she began to retch, Oddgeir slipped a slop bucket from underneath the galley stove in front of her and she held it with one hand. When she was done, she lay down on the fold out berth and slept and woke in a fright, thinking of Arthur. She somehow got forward in the total darkness. The wind was still howling and the boat was being tossed around like a bit of flotsam in the apocalyptic rage of an elemental meltdown. Arthur was still sleeping, as soundly as any child in a crib on the rock solidest foundation of middle Repho. She lay next to him and prayed. Not knowing to what or how, her prayers took the form of a pure supplication to transcendent mystery in charge of the storm. If they could just somehow ride it out and if she could avoid getting hit by a wave while on watch, that would be the most merciful outcome and appreciated with every fiber and nerve cell in her body.
But for four days and nights she stayed in the berth. Beth changed Arthur's diapers, wiped Corrag's head with one of the damp cloths, assured her it would be all right. She wasn't able to take any watches, or join them in the galley, barely able to lift her head to sip at the broths made from frozen calves' livers. Beth brought them for her. They were making their way down the seaboard with the wind on a broad reach and that meant a faster passage into the shelter of the gulf of the St. Lawrence, she said assuringly. Then one day the wind stopped and they were motoring past cliffs on the starboard, the mountains behind them. Corrag made her way out on the deck with Arthur. His eyes blinked at the unfamiliar sun. The water was a gently rolling field of blue, and the little fishing boats plying their way out to the traps reminded Corrag of the print hanging on the wall of the bathroom in the Hunnewell farm, a vintage marine scene by John Cleveley, View of a Seaport.
Nobody was saying much. They were exhausted. The radio was crackling with messages not intended for the Belle Enfant. Bob sat at the map table with the screen on and stared at nothing in particular. Oddgeir was in the pilothouse steering and Beth sitting beside him on the stool, her legs crossed and a mug of something steaming in her gloved hands.
"Ah, there it is," said Bob, stroking his beard and then rubbing his hands together. He shut off the screen and leaned out the hatch.
"It's on for tonight," he yelled. "Bring it around north by northeast and we'll aim for the channel buoys."
"Where are we?" asked Corrag, once he was back inside. She had Arthur in her arms. Her legs felt wobbly.
"Sit down girl. You're not well. Thank God we're here. You couldn't have gone on much longer in that way."
"I was pretty sick, wasn't I?"
"Not too bad. This is Ille Royale. We're putting in here. We're to meet our people here soon. I've let them know. Have your bags packed."
Bob was excited, with the air of a quiet man on the verge of a major coup. Corrag was not surprised when, after they'd pulled alongside the jetty on the island once intended for container ships picking up agricultural produce, with large eroded cement columns rising from the murky, silty waters of the tidal river, two boxlike trucks pulled up and spilled out a half dozen men in regular clothes but a common fitness level that spoke to her of military training. Oddgeir tied off the hawser on the rusted cleat and the men approached him. Bob, sitting in the pilothouse, focused on cutting off the motor. Arthur peered out the porthole in the galley in Corrag's arms. Then he wanted to be put down. Corrag had her bag in the galley berth there with her, and Beth did something at the stove. It was about mid-morning, and Corrag wondered aloud if they were coming for her or the cargo or both.
"What do they look like?" asked Beth.
"Chinese,"said Corrag. They're all of them Chinese or something."
"That's the Triangle Shimwa. They're here for the rock not for you."
Three of the men came aboard talking jovially with Bob. They went below and lifted the planks off the cargo hold. They began hauling the heavy metal boxes off the boat with Oddgeir's help. It took two men to a box. They loaded them in their trucks and Bob was handed an envelope with his payment in Republican dollars, still the strongest American currency. As they worked, Bob and Beth conferred in the galley, planning their route southward. They wanted to be in Bermuda in two weeks and then Recife by the middle of September. The problem was the Gulf Stream, to determine which way was it running. Sometimes it ran in reverse and sometimes it stalled and sometimes it ran full force up to the Scandinavian lands. It was the sign of a planet trying to shrug off a sickness. Then a man appeared on the jetty pushing a bicycle. Corrag leaned out of the hatch to see who it was whistling. She thought he had also a vaguely Asiatic air, with a thick head of white hair and a still black goatee.
"Are you the young mother?"
"I might be."
"Yes. Let me introduce myself although there is little time for pleasantry. The local constabulary is just now coming off the Ille Royale bridge. My name is Montaquila, Edmund. The Cicero of the Laurentian Plain."
"Let me get my baby."
"Yes, forget the rest of your shit and post haste, chicky."
Montaquila owned a zipbike, but it appeared to be non-functional. As he pushed it up the hill away from the water’s edge, he grunted and cursed. Corrag followed at a safe distance, with Arthur tied to her front in a sling. When she looked back, the Belle Enfant was motoring away from the jetty and the three trucks’ doors were sliding closed. Montaquila was making hard for a dirt trail leading away through a narrow gate into a children's park of slides and swings. He got the zipbike off the road and stopped. Just then a convoy of siren sounding, bot-driven armored vehicles with the insignia of the Quebec Provincial Guard came roaring down the main road past Corrag. She stepped onto the hard shoulder and covered Arthur's ears with both her hands. The Shimwa trucks below made squealing turns off the pier and headed in the opposite direction. Gunfire sounded and the QBP responded with automatic lasers from their roof-mounted cannons that exploded one truck and disintegrated the tires off another, sending it careening off the pier and into the river below. The lead truck turned a corner onto a street of summer residences, the house owners soon returning to open windows and mulch the hydrangeas.
The streets quieted down. Corrag picked herself up and dusted Arthur's knees and legs with her hands. He needed a diaper change. One Shimwa truck had escaped. Military choppers circled above the pier with searchlights on, looking for survivors. The sun was sinking in the western sky behind the lineaments of the ancient city of Quebec. Corrag helped Arthur down the slide. He was an intrepid climber and had gotten stuck halfway up the incline and lay on his belly and laughed while Corrag pulled at his feet. Montaquila was on his emosponder, pacing with a bedraggled look
, speaking loudly, repeating to make himself better understood to the person on the other end of the connection.
Hours passed and the sky was dark except for a thin sliver of a waxing moon. Montaquila had gotten her to talk about herself. He asked her to trace the roots of her faith. She hedged a little, but mentioned her Democravian upbringing with its respect for religiosity if not any particular religion as responsible for her sense that some kind of faber was ultimately responsible for all. Montaquila, surprisingly, was agnostic although he sympathized deeply, he said, with people's right to believe in any kind of self-perpetuating system.
"So why are you ... why do you support the Jonah?" asked Corrag
"They're an effective bunch of people,” he answered curtly.
"Wouldn't you like to believe?
Montaquila paced. She had the sense that the conversation was taking a tack that he didn't quite find favorable.
"Not necessarily. Look, the idea of a messianic victory is very nice, and might in fact be in the cards. But that's not where I place my bets. However, the Jonah rocks when it comes to rocking the boat, and that's my game. I'm a disruptive from way back, baby. Rock and roll just never died with me. I will shake the Whale with a shimmy in the belly. What about you? Do you honestly believe that stuff about the three generations before the system dissolves with the approach of the man god on the pale horse and the hordes of angels driving out demons into the stinking river that divides the good souls from the bad souls? Isn’t that slightly medieval?"
"It's in the Book of Hebrews. Much older than the Middle Ages. Have you read it?"
"No. Have you?"
"I've listened to some of it."
"We have some people who have genuine visions. You'll meet them. They think you are the root of Jesse or somebody. The red heifer. Except this will be a new temple in a barren land."
"Listen, I really just want to get back to Edmundstown and find my parents at this point."
"You can't shake the weight of history once it comes bearing down on your head, Corrag. Just roll with it. That's my advice."
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 26
