Seeklight

by Kevin Wayne Jeter

  He sat down heavily on the uncovered bed, his head whirling in confusion. That must be the other one who just signed on, he thought. But that can’t be . . .

  After a moment the bathroom door opened and the other new mertzer stepped out, fastening the last button on a shirt like the ones Daenek had stowed in his bag. Daenek studied the other’s short, lean body and sharp-featured face, dominated by eyes that seemed to fill with a disturbing feral hunger. He had never seen eyes like that before. The other returned Daenek’s stare with a growing annoyance: “What’s the matter with you?”

  “You’re a woman,” said Daenek flatly. There was no doubting it, despite the hard-edged mannishness of the figure standing before him. What he had glimpsed through the door, the smooth arc of her small breasts, was unmistakable.

  She put her hands where her hips should have been, and glared at him. “So what of it?” Her voice was a nasal tenor, a man’s voice.

  “I’m the only one who knows,” said Daenek. “Aren’t I?” He watched her scowling face, judging by it that she was the same age as himself.

  “Yeah, well, what good’s a secret nobody knows. Right?” She crossed over to the entrance door and leaned against it, as if to stop him from leaving. “I sure hope you’re not thinking this gives you some kind of advantage over me. ’Cause it doesn’t, friend.”

  More than just her words sounded threatening to him. “What do you mean?”

  “They told me that a busker who had gotten himself in trouble with some local guys had just signed aboard. But, you see—” Her face altered, became crafty. “—a busker is what I used to be before I got on here. I was born a busker. So I know you’re not one.”

  Daenek thought he could feel something clench near his stomach. “So?”

  “Come on.” Contempt filtered into her voice. “Buskers have never been so popular that anybody has ever tried to pass as one who didn’t have a good reason for hiding what he really was.”

  “I’m not hiding anything.” Daenek’s throat felt as if it were being slowly constricted.

  “Sure.” She scratched idly at one of her teeth with a fingernail. “I’ll find out what it is. I’m good at finding things. You’d be surprised.”

  The thoughts in Daenek’s head seemed to race faster and faster. No women on board the caravans—all back in the mertzers’ home village. Like sailors’ superstitions on Earth, that I read about in Stepke’s old books. Only worse. So that’s my hold on her. But why do I need it? What’s she got on me? Nothing—but just the suspicion could crack it all open. Pieces there for anyone to see. And then what? Kicked off, or turned over to the subthane after all. He glanced at the girl’s smug face, the hooded but probing eyes. Thane’s son. The hatred, the fear. No losing it. Be careful.

  “You know,” said Daenek slowly, “I wouldn’t necessarily have told anyone about you.”

  She smiled, a ferocious grin. “Real buskers make sure of things like that. We learn to cover ourselves first, and then talk.”

  Silence. Daenek shrugged and gestured with one hand. “It looks like we’re going to be sharing this room, then.”

  “Looks like it.” She watched as Daenek packed his jacket and the bag of clothing into one of the footlockers.

  He closed the lid and looked up into her hard-eyed, penetrating gaze. “If you’re right,” he said, “if I’m not what they think I am, I’m not going to tell you.”

  “You won’t have to.” Her voice had a trace of amusement in it. “Believe me.”

  Daenek stood up. He was starting to feel angry. “We’d better get on down to the engine room. They’re probably waiting for us.”

  “Yeah?” The girl laid down on the other bed and yawned extravagantly. “I didn’t sign on this thing so I could play nursemaid to some machine.”

  “You haven’t stopped being a busker, have you?”

  She turned her head and looked at him without smiling.

  “Don’t say busker like you’d say crook. It’s a life like anybody else’s.”

  Without replying, he crossed to the door. He halted as he stepped out into the corridor. Over his shoulder he said: “By the way, my name’s Daenek.”

  “Rennie,” said the girl, her eyes closed. “Greetings.”

  He closed the door and strode towards the stairway, a bitter fury building up around his heart. There was more thinking to be done—a great deal more. He was sure of that.

  Chapter X

  The engine room was a pulsing universe of noise and black grease that coated every surface. The grinding roar of the engines could be felt like a pressure on the skin. Ducking his head beneath clusters of pipes and wires, Daenek finally located the mechanics. In a little open space surrounded by clattering machinery, the head mechanic was checking a bank of gauges—the glass covering the dials was nearly opaque with the dust and grease—and making notes on a clipboard. A few meters away several other mechanics crouched around an overturned box, engaged in a slow card game. None of them looked up as Daenek squeezed between a pair of enormous, rust-caked cylinders and into the open space. The whole area was lit by a dull yellow glow that filtered down from somewhere far above, murky with dust and shadows.

  The chief mechanic finished whatever he was doing with the clipboard, turned away from the gauges and noticed Daenek. He nodded and motioned Daenek to come closer. “My name’s Benter,” he said, shaking Daenek’s hand in large, calloused fist.

  He pointed to the cardplayers, none of whom seemed to notice as he rattled off their names. His hand swung around the space in a sweeping gesture. “As you can see,” he said, “there’s not much to do around here when everything is running right. When they first built these things, they built ’em to pretty much look after themselves. It’s only when some part breaks down that we have to get to work.”

  Daenek looked around himself. The floor of the engine room was discolored and splotched with drying spills, and what looked like scraps of food growing furry with mould. He found it hard to believe that there was nothing to do but play cards in the middle of all the disorder. A tiny whisp of steam leaked into the air from a sagging pipe.

  “Well,” said Daenek, “what’s my job then?” His skin was beginning to feel itchy from the dirt and constant mechanical vibration in the air.

  Benter paged through several sheets on his clipboard, each bordered with dark thumbprints. “We’re putting you and the other new guy on the night watch.” He pencilled a mark on one of the papers. “We cut back on the power loads at night, so there’s less that can go wrong. All you have to do is watch these gauges and get hold of me if anything goes wrong. Sound OK?”

  Daenek nodded.

  “Then if we have to work on something during the day,” he continued, “you can help out. That’s about the only way you’ll learn how things go together down here.”

  For the next several minutes the head mechanic scribbled down the proper gauge readings on the back on one of the clipboard’s bottom sheets. He tore off the paper and handed it to Daenek. “There’s the ’phone,” he said, pointing to a barely discernible lump on one wall. “Just pick it up, if anything happens on your shift—it’s direct into my sleeping quarters. Get you and your buddy down here about nine o’clock, OK?”

  Folding the paper and slipping it into his pocket, Daenek nodded and turned to leave. Something caught his eye—a flat rectangular object propping up one corner of some kind of metal tank. The cylinder had a gaping hole in one side, obviously beyond use. He stepped over to the corner where it had been placed out of the way, then knelt down and examined the object that was being used to hold it upright . . .

  It was a book, caked with years’ accumulated grease and dirt.

  Daenek lifted up the tank’s bottom edge and slid out the book from beneath it. The covers were warped into a concave shape from the constant weight of the tank. He twisted it in his hands, straightening it a little, and opened it. The book’s spine cracked and split apart. Something in the grease had seeped into the pap
er, staining it a dark brown. He could make out enough of the words to tell that it was in English. When he turned the stiff pages to the front of the book, he found the name STEPKE written there.

  “What’s that?” Benter had come up beside him.

  The memory of that other mertzer’s face faded, leaving nothing but the filth-encrusted book in Daenek’s hands.

  “Something I found under here.”

  Benter walked a few steps away, then returned with a scrap of metal that he pushed under the corner of the tank with his foot.

  Daenek stood up, still holding the book.

  “I remember the guy that belonged to.” Benter pointed his blunt, grease-darkened finger at the book. “He was landed off the caravan—oh, a long time ago. He used to read us stuff from some of the books he had. Poetry and stuff.” The edge of a smile. “Yeah, I remember that. But then—” A disturbed, suspicious expression crept over his features.

  Daenek turned away from the mechanic, as if there were some secret in his own face that was about to be discovered by the other. “I’ll be back at nine for my shift,” he said without looking behind. Pressing the book to his chest, he squeezed his way through the maze of jumbled machinery, away from the space filled with dim yellow light.

  Rennie wasn’t in the room when Daenek returned. He stretched himself out on his bed and examined the book. The title page was illegible. In fact, most of the book was unreadable due to the grease that had permeated it. Still, thought Daenek, maybe it’s a sign. From out of the depths and heart of this world so so foreign to me. A vision of Stepke slowly toiling through the sunlit fields up to the house in which he and his mother lived. The mertzer’s voice. I was a stranger there, too, reflected Daenek. Just as much as he was. Maybe that’s what finding the book means. He dropped the book beside the bed. A tiny switch on the wall behind his head turned off the room’s overhead light. He closed his eyes in the darkness. Sleep was welcome now that he had come to a decision about what had to be done.

  He awoke and thought he saw the dim beam of a flashlight moving about in the darkness at the foot of his bed. His hand found the light switch and quickly flicked it on.

  Crouched in front of Daenek’s footlocker was Rennie, frozen in surprise for a fraction of a second. The lid of the footlocker had been thrown back, and the clothing inside thrown about in confusion. In one hand she held a small flashlight and in the other some type of little device Daenek didn’t recognize.

  Rennie scrambled to her feet as Daenek sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of his bed. He felt a little irritated at the interruption of his sleep, but no great surprise at what he had found her doing. “Just what are you up to?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” The flashlight and the other object had disappeared into her pockets.

  He yawned and scratched himself. This was something that could be gone into later, he decided. There were more important things to be decided between himself and this strange girl.

  “What time is it?”

  “They just rang nine, I think.” She eyed him warily as she leaned against the door.

  Her words brought him to full alertness. “Hey, we’re supposed to be down in the engine room right now. To start our shift.” He jumped up and picked his jacket from out of the jumble of clothing in his footlocker.

  She said nothing but merely followed him out of the room and then matched his hurried stride down the corridor. He noticed that the end of the flashlight he had seen her using was protruding from her jacket pocket, but the other object, whatever it had been, was jammed tight with her hand in her other pocket.

  They emerged onto the deck, bright with one full moon. As they passed by several small crowds of mertzers, playing cards upon the bulkheads and lazily arguing among themselves, a few impassive faces looked up at them, then turned back to more interesting things.

  Daenek glanced at the girl walking beside him. She was small but any trace of femininity was well concealed. It was easy to see how she was able to pass for a male. Hard, thought Daenek. Just like a rock.

  When the two of them had descended into the guts of the caravan and threaded their way to the engine room, there was only one mechanic left on duty. He growled “About time,” and stalked off in the direction from which they had come, his shoulders hunched in anger.

  Daenek took the scrap of paper the chief mechanic had given him and went from gauge to gauge checking the readings. There was only one that didn’t match—Daenek tapped the dial’s dust-fiecked glass and the needle swung to its proper place. He turned around and saw Rennie expertly shuffling a worn pack of cards that had been left behind by the other mechanics. She gazed around the ill-lit space with a bored expression. “Care for a game?” she said when Daenek had caught her attention.

  “We’ve got some other things to talk about.” He sat down on one of the upended boxes.

  Rennie leaned against a battered metal column and looked at him with half-closed eyes. “Shoot.”

  The engine room was quieter than when he had been in it earlier in the day. The air was filled with the murmur of the machinery that stretched away into the darkness on all sides of them. A dimly-lit world in the depths of another one, crawling slowly over the surface of yet another world. Daenek was quiet for a few moments, as he suddenly thought of the stars beyond the world. What of those people, and all the languages they spoke? There was an infinity beyond this small space.

  “Well,” said Rennie, breaking into his thoughts.

  He looked up at her sharp, almost cruel face. “I was just thinking,” he said, “that maybe we could come up with some kind of agreement between us. You know, something that would be to our mutual advantage.”

  “Yeah?” She smiled. “What would that be?”

  Hesitating, he took a deep breath and studied the girl’s amused expression. Still, he thought, what have I got to lose? It’d be worse if she found out on her own. “You were right,” he said slowly, “I’m not what they think I am . . .”

  He talked of being the son of the last thane. Of growing up surrounded by the villagers’ hate and fear. Of his mother, the Lady Marche, and the mute watcher. Then of the few words, clues that seemed like cracks in the wall that had been built to hide what had happened in the past from him. That which saddened the sociologist by the pool in the rocks, and Stepke refused to explain; the old bishop’s mur-murings after the killing of the bad priest; the key that the Lady Marche had given him as she was dying, and that had been lost when he was being hunted in the storm by the subthane’s men. And he spoke of what he had to do, the obsession that had settled in his chest, that beat through the same blood as his heart. To find what had happened to his father—the last thane.

  “And that’s it,” said Daenek. “When I signed on board here, I figured it would be a safe way to get to the Capitol. And maybe, if I were careful, to find out a few more things before we got there. The answer has to be there.”

  “Thane’s son,” mused Rennie. The mocking smile had gradually faded as she listened to him. “Yeah, you probably are safe here—for a while. I don’t think anybody outside your village even knew that the old thane had a kid. Except for whoever did him in, of course.”

  “The Regent,” said Daenek grimly.

  “Maybe. Seems the most likely, at any rate.” She scratched her chin meditatively, then looked directly at him. “But what’s all this got to do with me? I don’t know anything about what happened that long ago.”

  “I thought you might help,” said Daenek simply. “We’re both outsiders here. Maybe we should stick together.”

  She was lost in thought for a moment. Finally she stood away from the column she had been leaning against and thrust her hands into her pockets. “All right,” she said. “I figure a thane probably would’ve squirreled something away. There might be some profit in all this.”

  “Profit?” Daenek looked at her, puzzled.

  “Profit,” she repeated. “You know, cash. Money.”

  The idea had neve
r occurred to him. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Come on.” Her voice was sharp-edged with disgust. “Maybe other people sweat for something else, but— Look, why do you think I got on board here?”

  “Wait a minute. That must be why you were going through my stuff.”

  “Look here.” She held something out to him on her palm.

  “Know what this is?”

  He looked and saw a small device made of tarnished metal and shaped like a flattened egg. There was a small faceted dot of clear glass on one side. “No,” he said, but recognized it as what she had been holding when she was searching his footlocker.

  “It’s called a seeklight. Buskers used to make ’em, until they forgot how, years ago. This is probably the last one that still works— I got it from my father. Only because he didn’t have a son.” Her voice became hard for a moment. “Watch.”

  Daenek leaned forward and saw her fish a large coin out of her pocket. It glittered even in the dim light of the engine room.

  Gold—the most valuable coin minted in the Capitol. Rennie held it a few inches away from the seeklight in her other hand. Its little faceted dome was glowing a brilliant red.

  “See?” she said, flipping the seeklight over to expose a small knurled wheel set into a slot. “I can adjust it to locate any gold from here to within a circle of several kilometers.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out several more coins, some jewelry and other trinkets—all gold.

  The jingling handful of yellow metal filled Daenek with dismay. I’ve gotten hooked up with a thief, he realized. If they catch her . . . it’s my neck, too.

  She had read the expression on his face. “Ahhh, don’t worry. I’ve just hit a few caches on board—just enough to keep my hand in. Something like this is too good to waste. I’m not cut out for the ways busker women usually make money. So when I got this from my old man I figured I needed a way of getting in and out of a lot of places with people in them. People that like to stash their little hoards in places where they think it can’t be found.”