We rode in silence down the old highway towards The University. If it were summer, we’d have taken the beach route, with the billions of stars raining down on the rocky shore, their radiance completely undeterred by human light pollution any longer. But it was cold and getting windier, and I tucked my face into my long scarf until we pulled onto the Ring Road around the famous concrete campus.
Idly, I wondered if the astronaut commander would know how to get the school’s impressively large telescope back in working order. Might as well still enjoy dreaming about other worlds, now that we’d fucking wrecked this one.
***
Uncle Marty (sorry, The Admiral) had an office in the main campus center building, though it was an unobtrusive one, tucked up a strange set of stairs off of the auditorium. The walls, some thirty feet high with only one small sideways window at the top, were filled up with his favorite acquisitions. The highest parts of the wall featured huge medieval tapestries, while a little lower, there were some larger classic masterpieces. An El Greco, a Dali, a Monet, a Cezanne. Below that, there was an array of vintage weapons, swords and shields and helms and lances, not so high that they’re out of arm’s reach. Around eye-level were more paintings, as well as carefully-compiled curio cabinets of sculptures, glassworks, silver, and ancient stone statues.
The Admiral admired it all.
What he didn’t admire was tardiness, inefficiency, indecision, and problems that should have been solved long before they were presented to him. After he’d pored once again over the folder of space-based images, he sat back in his regal, intricately-carved wooden throne of an office chair. He stared over his slim silver-rimmed glasses at me, his sea-green eyes roiling and short, spiky white hair standing at attention.
“I can’t take them both, and I can’t reject a kid who’s being held in servitude. What do you propose we do about this, Reli?”
“Sir, if it’s possible to continue to allow the commander to stay in the hydro lab…”
“I’m not making one of our greatest Americans live like an underfunded grad student. We’ll find him a room on campus, somehow. What I’m concerned with is how we can integrate him into the system, organize classes and classrooms for him, obtain enough supplies to escalate the science he wants. It’s not just him, Reli. It’s everything he stands for. We’re never going to reach the level of greatness he was a part of. Not even if he helps us to try harder to get there.”
“It’s just different, sir,” I mumbled. “It’s still very decent.”
“’Very decent’ might be fine for you and I, but it’s not normal enough when a ten-year-old child is living among bloodthirsty pirates.”
“I could trade for him, sir. There’s enough gunpowder and fuel to spare…”
“We are NOT abetting piracy. It’s bad enough I gave Captain Brough a letter of marque and now he’s traipsing selling pot and stealing camels.”
“It was a giraffe, sir.”
“I don’t care. We need to figure out a way to get that kid off Captain Arturo’s boat without aiding his armory OR having half the town burned to the ground by angry Spanish marauders.”
I took a deep breath and explained Rudy’s idea about enslaving (no, trading) Harold.
“He’s of no use,” The Admiral said. “Even if he did do the painting, neither I nor Captain Arturo wants someone who can forge ‘Starry Night’. I want someone who can help us rebuild our entire goddamn society. I don’t care what the raiders want, as long as it doesn’t involve intervening with us.”
On that point, I needed to raise another question. “What about the intel on the Chinese? You think there’s anything to it?”
“If it is, we’ll find out soon enough. I’m sending Rudy to Boston to get to the bottom of things.”
Something inside my chest suddenly felt sticky. “Sir, doesn’t Captain Brough have to…”
“He’ll sail north and verify if there are new Maine encampments and farms, first. He can offload a holdful of beer barrels between there and Boston and have plenty of room for cargo on the return trip. If there are refugees or artifacts he wants to recover en route home, we’ll be ready.”
If he returns home. If the Chinese haven’t overrun Boston looking for goods and gold.
But I couldn’t stand there in front of one of the most important men left in the world and defy his orders. Then I’d never get a letter of marque, or sail with anyone who had one.
“But if this Harold guy is right, shouldn’t we use him to gather more intel?”
The Admiral gave me an almost bored glare. “You know as well as I do that if he was somehow close enough to get Chinese intel, they know he’s here right now. He’s burned.” The Admiral continued to examine the documents from the astronaut commander, the Harold issue no longer pressing. Glancing briefly up at me, he stated with finality, “Tell this Harold his service is of no interest. His collateral is no good with me.” He looked down over his glasses. “Take whatever compensation you require from him.”
The unspoken “even if that compensation IS him” didn’t hang dreadfully in the air. It was just a fact. I’d either have to kill Harold, have him killed, or slave-trade with actual pirates who I’d just as soon not court the dubious graces of.
This was my problem now. The Admiral had more important ones to deal with.
As I was mentally calculating how valuable an apparently, non-military, non-navy, non-reality-oriented weirdo like Harold would be toward a seasoned, mean, murder-prone pirate crew, a strange soundtrack permeated the room.
It seemed like it must certainly be in my head, but when The Admiral looked up at me quizzically, I realized he could hear it too.
A piano sonata. Bach, maybe. It’d been a while since I’d caught any orchestras.
The music was only mildly muffled by the tall concrete walls, but the intercoms of course hadn’t worked since A-Day. The Admiral, straightforward as ever, solved the mystery by opening the office door off to the side of his desk.
I’d known the door was there, but often forgot, thanks to it being obscured by an elegant medieval unicorn tapestry, one of a few that were nice enough to deserve eye-level status. The moment the tapestry was pushed aside and the door was opened, the music floated in fancifully.
Uncle Marty, The Admiral, gave me a stern but intrigued look, as though this were part of some surprise party prank on both of us, and I better not have been in on it.
We walked out onto the small balcony that overlooked the cavernous concrete main auditorium. Back in the day, the room had seen the likes of The Clash, Bob Dylan, Henry Rollins, and probably thousands of theater productions. Now, it served mostly for major University meetings.
Not today though.
Onstage, lit by military-grade floodlights that had been rescued from an underground nuke bunker somewhere, a kid (who I assumed must be Pablo) was absolutely shredding the sonata.
Sitting next to him on the bench, utterly rapt, was Joy.
The only person in the audience was the astronaut. He still looked surprisingly like the same guy who’d graced the cover of TIME magazine and newspapers nationwide when he’d returned from an important, lengthy space mission. Even from my perch on the balcony, thanks to the glow of the massive lights onstage, I could tell his stoic face was entrenched in a tsunami of tears. He wasn’t angry though. He was enraptured.
Stock-still, unwillingly to even breathe lest we somehow disrupt the fantastic flow of the music, The Admiral and I just stood there on the balcony. Like two sailors high in a crow’s nest who’ve just spotted land but are still trying to suss out if it’s a mirage or not, we let the sound transport us, sailing ever further into what could be the promise of a marvelous new world.
The astronaut felt the same, I could just tell. He was wearing the look I remembered he’d worn on the news when he first was retrieved from his space capsule. A look of wonder, of fulfillment, of knowledge and survival thanks to teamwork from all that was great in mankind. Yes, the heroic astr
onaut and former commander of the space station, a man who’d gazed at everything our entire earth could offer, and there he was, reduced to tears by a child and a few harmonious frequencies.
His value to history and the future stopped dead in its tracks for one critical, heartwrenching moment of the present.
I didn’t envy the Admiral the choice he was going to have to make, figuring out a way to somehow protect both the best of our past and the best of our future.
***
Chapter Six – Impressions
Rudy and I made the rounds of the musicians’ dorm, laughing and drinking through the incessant clouds of smoke and hail of sounds produced therein. I knew we couldn’t linger too long (hell, I can hang in that dorm all day every day, and have been known to lose significant amounts of time there) so we quickly rallied the six band members who were performing that evening. (I won’t tell you their names, but you’ve heard of them. One of them, long ago, had jokingly been referred to as the likeliest human candidate to survive the apocalypse, and I gotta tell you, we’re all really happy that he did.)
After dropping them off at the bar and abetting their setup, Rudy went to go talk to the Rockeros about me talking to Robbo. He was probably also talking to the Rockeros about all manner of other illicit business, but I didn’t intervene. Not my circus, not my pirate-ass monkeys.
Harold was still in the brig. It was safest, really. For now.
I busied myself making sure the bar’s guests, now filtering in for pre-show drinks, were feeling well and welcome. I tacked up all the new pictures and posts on my Placebook Wall, an analog version of an old social media favorite, formerly accessible via a little device that’d fit in your hand, but which now runs about twenty feet along the back left wall of Trooley’s. It was a nice way for people with paper “profiles” to leave messages, pictures, replies and promises for those whose ships or overland convoys might not find them in the same place too often. Today it was filled with love notes.
The crowd hadn’t really arrived yet, so Santi had the bar well in hand. Couples canoodled in the lamplight, sipping weed-mead or one of the many fine local craft beers, ciders or sparkling wines. The old vacuum-tube jukebox was blasting funky 45 records, I was engaged in a hearty round of pool with two of the musicians and one of Officer Rick’s troopers, and everything seemed copacetic.
But when Rudy and Manny came in, I could tell by the looks on their faces that they were up to something.
We convened upstairs in the Officer’s Club immediately. I’d decided to keep it closed for the evening, as the main bar could easily accommodate most crowds, and anyway we had business to discuss.
“We’re sticking to HIS story,” Manny explained. “You said the guy tried to sell it that he was on a cleanup crew in NYC? Sweet. Hold him to that. Robbo will send some crimps to boost him real quick.”
“I can’t walk the guy out the front door, though. Too much chance he’ll straight flee. And I can’t let a band of Robbo’s raiders saunter into my sub-basement.”
“Seal the sub-basement doors, let them use the regular old shanghai tunnel. The one you use for keg transport to the docks,” Rudy said.
“Set him free here, in the bar, once it gets real crowded,” Manny added. “Leave the tunnel to the vault open in the kitchen. Wham-bam-hot-damn, homeboy’s gonna be scrubbin’ decks by sun-up.”
“What does Robbo think I’m asking for in return?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Manny said. “You don’t gotta worry you sold the dude out. I’m just gonna tell Robbo you caught some asshole who tried to boost something off the bar’s collection, you didn’t have the heart to kill his ass, and you’re setting him free up in here after you use him for some hard labor.”
“As opposed to using our boy Manuel Laborrrrr for it,” Rudy joked, rolling the “r” at the end of his mean nickname for Manny.
It wasn’t a good plan, but it was definitely a plan. There was one major issue.
“I’m not letting Robbo in here. If the raiders act decently, they can boost him out from the bar like you say, but Robbo’s too much of a liability.” I didn’t need to elaborate on the fact that if Captain Roberto Arturo learned too much of the floorplan here, he’d eventually come back and loot us lock-fucking-stock. Art was an armistice, maybe, but my considerable cache of everything from firearms to Fentanyl was something else.
“Problem solved,” said Rudy. “Time to rock the boat.”
***
Rudy’s ship, the U.S.S. Pot Yacht, was corsair-style craft that, like its revolutionary brethren of the original Massachusetts Navy, flew under a flag bearing a green pine tree against a white background with “AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN” as its motto in black. The pine tree on this particular flag bore more than a passing resemblance to a cannabis plant, but hey, to each their own appeal to heaven.
The lower decks were filled with an ingenious array of cannabis grow-bins, fed from solar panel-powered LED lights (reclaimed from inside a metal warehouse that had served as an impromptu Faraday cage on A-Day) and desalination tanks. One storage hold was full of dried and packaged buds, while kegs of weed-mead and local beer also served as good ballast. The main quarters were decorated in a comfortable, chill style, with a few cozy couches serving as communal chairs.
Robbo was not sitting in any of them. He and two of his confederates were standing militarily upright, hands on sword pommels, ready to parley or pounce.
I’d only seen Captain Roberto Arturo a few times before, and always from afar. Once or twice through a spyglass on my roof, just to make sure he wasn’t making any trouble when docking or leaving port. From that distance, he’d appeared very handsome, his dark Spanish complexion, shadowy scruff, and sumptuous, chin-length brown hair giving him an exotic appeal. He favored wearing all black, in a classically piratical style, and it most certainly suited his tall, sinewy frame. His musculature made him appear relaxed, but I was certain at any point he could lunge and make a kebab out of Rudy, Manny, and I, all in one fell stab. Close up, his brown eyes appeared hard and black, wily and creepy-calm at the same time. His facial expression was just dark.
Not moody dark. Like, something-left-a-mark dark. Sure, we’d all had our fair share of hard times these last few years, but goddamned if we didn’t most all just collectively agree to suck it up, hauling happy-hellishly hard, our bootstrap-clenching teeth gnashed into smiles.
I guess that made it even the more startling when someone still genuinely appeared haunted.
Robbo had, at some point, quite clearly been wronged.
I just hoped his countenance wasn’t so sour thanks to him already deducing my plan.
Like a knife cutting through a sail as a means of marauding in an old pirate movie, Robbo cut to the chase.
“Where is Pablo?” he asked in accented but effective English. “He was not to leave my men’s sight. I allowed Li to have him sent to your University for medical treatment she claimed he required. But my men were turned away at the gate, and now, we are owed.”
Rudy and Manny shifted uncomfortably. The real pirate in this bunch had already commandeered the conversation.
“I’ll make sure he’s back in your care tonight,” I said evenly. “Pablo needed fairly significant attention. In the meantime, I understand you’ve discussed another transaction with my colleagues here?”
“Yes,” Robbo sneered. “We will take out your trash. Congratulations on having a community so caring, you are willing to throw whole human beings to the mercy of pirates if you do not consider them useful enough.”
I wasn’t about to fight. I strongly wanted to return to the bar.
Never mind that I had no goddamn clue where the hell Pablo could possibly be.
“Have him working in the main bar by midnight,” Robbo decreed. “The loading tunnel will remain unobstructed and unlocked at both ends, if you value us not breaking in through your front door to obtain our mark.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“Pabl
o will be there as well. He will enter the tunnel and travel through it first, to ensure its safety for us. My men will follow. You will not draw attention nor action against us.” He paused and offered a smile that felt ghastly, despite his undoubtable good looks. “If you fail to meet any of these requirements, my men and I will raze your bar to the ground.”
“I understand.”
Robbo turned to Rudy, throwing him a small sack of what sounded like heavy coins. “We will take one barrel of your mead. You are not to follow us anywhere near New York City on this recovery mission. If I find out you have done so, we will shell your ship into a modern art masterpiece, installed at the bottom of the ocean.”
Rudy clapped his hands. “Cool, so we’re all in agreement! Great! Let’s get you boys that keg. Reli, Manny, guess there’s some pressing issues to attend to?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping for all the world that Robbo couldn’t hear my heart thunking through my chest at this range. I extended my hand toward him to seal the deal. Robbo stared at it flatly.
Figures. Pirates don’t have honor. They don’t shake on things. Ugh, how are you still such a fuck-up, even after everything in the whole rest of the world has been fucked up already?
His inscrutable black eyes fixed on mine, Robbo reached down, grasped my hand, and raised it to his lips. I felt dirty, but oddly, wildly excited. He could probably see my pulse thunking through the veins in my wrist. But I didn’t draw away.
Roberto Arturo, the pirate captain who’d just kissed my hand like the most aristocratic gentleman ever, barked an order in Spanish to his men and strode out of the room. Rudy ushered us out, then followed.
I asked Manny to come with me back to the bar. I needed someone to keep an eye on Harold, who was about to be released quite literally into the wild.
***
There was no way around it. We had to give the kid back if we wanted to avoid certain doom. We couldn’t just kidnap a pirate kid, even if he was being forced to play piano for ten hours a night.
Uncle Marty seemed to have known that from the get-go. Without mentioning my further plans for Harold, I got Uncle Marty to agree to have Pablo delivered to the bar. I hadn’t exactly been lying to Robbo. Pablo had indeed been medically vetted at The University that day, and found to have only a slight head cold accounting for his ill appearance. But the doctors had found no trace of any serious abuse, and as such, it behooved us to let him go.
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