“Mr. Chapin had political aspirations?” said Jeremiah. “He’s the last person I could ever imagine wanting to run for president.”
“That’s exactly what he said. But I had given him my word and I wasn’t going to take it back. I let the fires of justice burn low, but they have never fully gone out. Do you know that, even after marrying Henry, I once”—she dropped her voice and glanced at the door, to make sure no one was coming in—“voted Democrat? Well, once on purpose, and once in Florida,” she said, grimacing at the memory.
“When you get to a certain age, Jeremiah, you start thinking about your legacy. I have no children. I’ve done nothing notable in my life. But I won’t die without having done something worthwhile. And I’ve decided what it is: revolution. A worker’s revolution, starting with the workers on this ship.”
She stopped and looked at Jeremiah, as if matters should now be clear enough for him to take over the rest of the conversation.
“I don’t mean to sound discouraging,” he said, “but revolution sounds like a tall order. Have you considered starting smaller? The odd act of personal charity here and there? Organize a union, or a strike?”
“Haven’t you been listening? A tall legacy is what I’m after.”
“I just mean that figuring out how to accomplish it could be difficult.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Chapin, “and you don’t have much time.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Jeremiah, who was actually afraid that he followed quite well.
“Haven’t you been listening? You’re going to be my agent provocateur. You will move undetected among the workers, who will accept you as one of their own while you organize their glorious uprising. You’ll be my eyes and ears and mouth and right hand. The tip of my spear, Jeremiah.”
“As exciting as that sounds, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do it.”
“Why not?”
“For starters, I don’t think the other workers would really trust me to start a revolution on their behalf. After all, I have only been on the job for two days.”
“Then find some way to earn their trust.”
“Besides, revolutions require tremendous resources—both human and credit. I paid worse attention in history class than I like to admit, but I do remember that.”
“Anything worth doing requires resources,” said Mrs. Chapin. “You will find a way.”
“Finally, revolutions tend to be messy events. Soaked in blood, a new order built on the bodies of the old, that sort of thing.”
Mrs. Chapin frowned.
“I don’t think it would have to go quite that far,” she said.
“Revolutions are not generally known to be displays of restraint or half measures.”
“I’m not a details person, Jeremiah. Fine, maybe we don’t need a full, blood-soaked revolution. Just something to strike a bit of fear in the hearts of the oppressor class.”
“Mrs. Chapin, you do realize that you are part of that oppressor class?”
Mrs. Chapin laughed gently and shook her head.
“My heart can handle a bit of fear,” she said. “Look, Jeremiah, you figure this out, and do it quickly. This fire—the fire you kindled—can’t be extinguished or contained. Unless it’s put to good use, it could burn me up—it could burn all of us up. I’ll be back soon.”
Sighing and holding her hand to her heart, Mrs. Chapin managed to take her leave without swooning or requiring assistance.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said when she was at the door, “Henry must never know.”
8
Doors and Windows
Still Saturday (8 days until arrival)
Mr. Reynolds stopped by as Jeremiah was closing up.
“Oh yes,” he said after Jeremiah related the afternoon rush on keycards, “those things are finicky beasts. Playbook sorted you out?”
“Yes,” Jeremiah said, “but it’s strange that all the cards got finicky at the same time.”
“Your first day was all PEDs. Today was all keycards. Tomorrow it will be all the Relaxation Stations. These things always happen in streaks. Who can say why? Sympathetic vibrations? Cosmic rays? Well, I’m off.”
“Wait, I wanted to ask you—did you ever deal with Mrs. Mayflower?”
An uncomfortable look clouded Reynolds’s normally sunny face, as if the Disney Geppetto had suddenly been given a glimpse of the dark original story of Pinocchio, complete with final lynching.
“Mayflower?”
“Yes,” said Jeremiah. “Mrs. Mayflower. About yeigh high, relatively ancient, wears expensive clothes?
“Well I’ve heard the stories, of course, but I’ve never believed—you don’t mean to suggest that you actually saw her?”
“She came into the office today. What stories?”
“She’s real?” said Reynolds. He looked as if he needed to sit down.
“As far as I could tell. Listen, what stories?”
“What did she want?”
“She wants me to fix up her bandora,” Jeremiah said.
“Then you had better fix it up.”
“But who is she?” asked Jeremiah.
“She’s someone you don’t want to run afoul of—especially not in your situation. Just fix her bandora and don’t ask any questions, that’s my advice for you.”
“Do you even know what a bandora is?”
“If I’m not mistaken,” said Reynolds, who had regained some measure of composure, “it’s the thing that you’d do well to fix up for Mrs. Mayflower. Keep up the good work, I’m off.”
“Wait,” said Jeremiah, “I thought maybe we could have dinner.”
“Some other evening,” said Mr. Reynolds, tugging at his mustache. “Why don’t you have a late dinner with Katherine after she finishes her shift?”
* * *
A dinner with Katherine, late or early, being a highly dubious endeavor, Jeremiah took the bandora back to the suite before heading to the cafeteria. He had hoped to tell Luis what he’d learned from Mr. Werther, but the Mexican table had either already disbanded or not yet formed. Unable to face the synthed ham salad and whipped synthed potatoes without fellowship and moral support, Jeremiah left without eating.
For lack of any better pursuit Jeremiah stood in line to check his waves at the employee terminals. The checking was mostly pro forma—he did not expect to have a response from Appleton yet—but as he opened his inbox there it was, the most welcome sight Jeremiah had seen in days.
From: Appleton, B Subject: Re: Abject Poverty?
Jeremiah’s pulse quickened as he opened the wave, but the excitement did not last.
* * *
I am currently out of the office on personal leave.
If you require immediate assistance, please wave my assistant at etc. etc. etc.
* * *
In all the years that Jeremiah had known him, Appleton had never taken personal leave—or even, to Jeremiah’s knowledge, impersonal. He had taken a single sick day, once, on the occasion of his donating a kidney to a stranger in California.
For a moment Jeremiah was angry with Appleton, but the better angel on his shoulder whispered some sense into him. Appleton was not responsible for sitting by his terminal for 20 years, waiting for time dilation to level off and the Quantum Caterpillar Drive to ebb sufficiently to allow Jeremiah to wave him. For the moment, Jeremiah was on his own, and he would have to do the best he could in the circumstances.
In this new spirit of self-reliance he took advantage of the terminal to read everything he could find in the ship’s databanks about antique lute maintenance, which did not take long, as there was nothing. Then, just to kill some time, he wandered through the vast service underbelly of the ship until he found a dim spot where a stairwell mysteriously terminated at a blank wall. Drawn by the poetic resonance with his own situation, Jeremiah sat down on the second to top stair and repeated Ms. Domenico’s mental exercise.
* * *
Since his last visualization
a new reptile had found its way to the Guest Services Office: a frill-necked lizard in full display, as proud and threatening as Mrs. Chapin’s urgent desire for the revolution she had delegated to Jeremiah. The earlier inhabitants seemed to have changed a bit in the meantime, and not in reassuring ways: the iguana representing Carolus looked unwell, as if he had not eaten in some time; the monitor lizard of Mr. Drinkwater’s unrequited love for Mrs. Abdurov had its forked tongue out, as if sensing prey nearby, while the stage salamander on its head looked redder than he had before; meanwhile the Gila monster that was Mrs. Mayflower’s bandora held its mouth slightly open; and the dragon of Somewhat Satisfied seemed to stop breathing every now and then, as if he suffered from dracontine apnea and could awake, badly rested and exceedingly grumpy, at any moment.
This time the exercise did not do much to calm Jeremiah’s nerves or improve his mood.
“Eight days,” he said to himself, sitting on the concrete stairs and rocking back and forth in the dim light. “Just eight more days.”
But a pessimistic little voice at the back of his mind would not stop whispering “eight more days, and then two more years.”
* * *
When Jeremiah arrived back at the suite, Katherine was once again locked up in her room listening to music. A light, poppy beat came through the door, along with the occasional snap of bass or cry of guitar, and the sounds made Jeremiah tremendously lonely, as if he were standing outside in the rain and sleet looking at a row of snug little houses with lit windows in the distance. He searched around for something to do—he would even have been glad to have thumbed through the playbook, if he hadn’t left it back at the office. Finally his eyes came to rest on Mrs. Mayflower’s bandora where he had left it in the corner. He picked it up.
It was a profound testament to his boredom and isolation that he felt glad to see those horrible little cherubs in their throes of seizure. There was some kindness in their rolled-back eyes that he hadn’t noticed before. Jeremiah even let a swell of fellow feeling for the serenading shepherd grow in his chest.
“At least she’s listening,” Jeremiah said out loud to the shepherd, pointing to the stout shepherdess who had so far resisted his charms. “Hearing you out. Not giving you the cold shoulder—not like someone else I could mention.”
The shepherd looked sympathetic, encouraging almost.
“Talk to her,” the shepherd’s expression seemed to say. “She has a heart, you just need to reach it. If I—an unattractive painting with job prospects no better than yours and a range of motion that is far worse—can do it, then so can you.”
Jeremiah crept up and put his ear to Katherine’s door. Was she moving around in there? Should he knock? The song tantalized him—he knew he knew it, but he couldn’t place the lyrics. Almost unconsciously he began to pluck at the bandora to find the key—B flat. The chord structure was simple—one four, one five, then a bridge. He could practically taste the lyrics on his tongue now. Strum, strum, something about getting back together, something wry about apology and forgiveness. The name of the song was hanging right there above him, like a ripe apple barely holding on to the tree, just about to fall and hit him on the head. Instead, without warning and with surprising force, it was the old-fashioned swinging door to Katherine’s bedroom that swung open and hit Jeremiah in the head—a fact he just had time to absorb before a kind of ringing darkness swallowed him and then went silent.
* * *
The next thing Jeremiah became aware of was an angel standing above him—welcoming him, he supposed, to the afterlife. She did not look as he had expected angels to look. Yes, she was quite beautiful, and the light in her hair made a passable halo—but she was also wearing some pretty workaday pajamas, and the expression on her face was not exactly angelically placid. Jeremiah would have described it more as “demonically pissed off.”
“Jeremiah? Can you hear me?”
He nodded, then immediately regretted having done so, as a tendon in his neck flared white hot.
“Are you all right?”
Jeremiah nodded again, to the repeated displeasure of the tendon in his neck. Apparently the blow to the head had impacted his ability to learn from recent experience.
“What were you doing outside my door?”
Jeremiah reached up to touch his face. It was wet.
“I’m covered in blood, aren’t I?”
“I threw cold water on you. What were you doing outside my door?”
“Just listening to that song, trying to play—wait,” he said, sitting up, all pain vanishing for a moment in a rush of adrenaline. “Where’s the bandora?”
“What’s a bandora?”
“The musical instrument I had in my hands—where is it?”
“Oh, the tacky ukulele thing? I put it on the sofa.”
“Let me see it,” said Jeremiah.
Katherine made a face at the command, but she fetched the bandora from the sofa and brought it to him.
Jeremiah put his face in his hands and groaned. Indeed, what Katherine was holding was the bandora, or it had been. Now it was more of a late stage build-your-own kit for the budding bandora enthusiast. The neck had sheared clear off, taking with it the body of one of the cherubs. His decapitated head—replete with protruding tongue and bulging, rolled-up eyes—perfectly expressed Jeremiah’s own state of mind.
“That ‘tacky ukulele’ thing is—or was—the last known bandora in the world,” he said. “It dates from the 16th century. Do you understand? We’ve just roasted the last passenger pigeon, fricasseed the only remaining dodo, filleted the final panda.”
“We?”
“You’re the one who opened the door,” said Jeremiah. He groaned again, louder.
“A person can’t be expected to go around opening the door to her own bedroom as if at any moment there could be an idiot playing a priceless tacky ukulele thing right outside it,” Katherine pointed out.
“You have to help me fix it,” said Jeremiah. “If Mrs. Mayflower finds out—”
“Mrs. who?”
“Mayflower.”
Katherine crinkled her nose.
“Mrs. Mayflower is a myth,” she said.
“I assure you, she’s quite real. She’s very rich and very unpleasant and actually kind of chic in a deeply retro way, and her hobbies include wrapping her problems in antique money and gifting them to other people. Like her bandora, which she gave me to perform some routine maintenance on. If I can’t fix this, and quick, Mr. Grubel and Mrs. Mayflower will personally see to it that I never set foot on Earth again.”
Jeremiah could see Katherine swaying between pity and some other thoughts (which he considered less worthy of her) that had to do with the sowing and reaping of just deserts.
“You never know,” he added, “Grubel might even make you room with me again.”
Katherine sighed.
“All right,” she said. “Let me change.”
* * *
After making him swear three times to follow her in complete silence, twice to obey her every instruction, and four times to forget everything he was about to see, Katherine led Jeremiah past the kitchen, through a long service corridor, down a set of stairs that looked like a fantastic place to be mugged even a few light-hours from downtown Detroit, and all the way to the end of yet another service corridor that terminated at a big, bunkered door with a glowing security keypad.
“You did not see me do this,” Katherine said, and then made sure that he didn’t, shielding the keypad with her left hand as she pushed four beeping keys with the index finger of her right. As soon as the big metal doors had sighed pneumatically and recessed into the walls, Katherine nudged Jeremiah into the darkness beyond. She touched a contact on the inside wall, and the lights flickered and came to life, illuminating a long, deep room of shelves and boxes and more shelves and more boxes.
“It’s a supply room,” Jeremiah said. “After all that cloak and dagger stuff I was expecting something more exotic—a ninja traini
ng facility or an alien autopsy or something.”
“This is the Einstein IV’s master supply room. This is where they keep the CO2 filters that keep us breathing and the freezers that keep us from starving to death and a bunch of other minor details like that. We’re not supposed to be in here—I’m not even supposed to know the combination. So let’s get what we’re looking for and get out of here.”
“What are we looking for?” asked Jeremiah.
“Let’s see,” said Katherine as she led him down the leftmost aisle, “glass cleaner, first aid, jewelry care.” She was reading aloud from small laminated signs hung low at the end of each row of shelves. “Detox, pool supplies, candles and illumination, cooking oils, lubricating oils, engine oils, other oils, pesticides. Ah, here we go: carpentry,” she said, and vanished into the aisle. Jeremiah followed.
“Hold this clamp,” said Katherine, pulling down something that looked like a medieval instrument of torture. “And this file. Now we just need glue.”
“So we’re going to glue together the 16th-century instrument that’s been split in half and just hope that Mrs. Mayflower won’t notice?”
“You have a better idea?” said Katherine. “Which do you think we want, ‘wood glue’ or ‘glue for wood’?”
“I have no earthly idea. What does it say on the labels?”
“‘Barnaby’s Wood Glue is the perfect wood glue for all your wood glue jobs.’”
World Enough (And Time) Page 8