The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle]

by Jeff Bredenberg

  Pec-Pec snorted. “I will teach him some humility. And perhaps he will teach me the bone-sounding.”

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  27

  Fireworks

  Rosenthal Webb was twenty-three years old, clothed in rotting cotton and leaning against a brick wall. Before him on the sidewalk hummed the bankers and restaurateurs and bureaucrats of downtown New Chicago. At his right hand was a paper-wrapped bottle. He stared forward blankly at the scuffling of feet, a promenade made more frenetic by the prospect of the holiday parade: In forty minutes the papery dragons would dance by, followed by the Werewistles in their elaborately plumed costumes, then the Belbugs in their whirling pedal carts and silly tasseled berets, and finally the procession of open-back Transport trucks bearing New Chicago’s Government elite in their holiday finery.

  This stretch of Michigan Avenue was an easy shuffle and stagger from the sprawling bunkhouses the Government provided for the underprivileged. So it was not unusual to find the north wall of the Commerce Ministry lined with ragged men and women clutching their bottles.

  But Rosenthal Webb was quite sober, as were his three compatriots mixed in with the crowd.

  An elderly man who smelled like spoiled cheese crouched in front of Webb. He spoke through numbed lips: “My name’s Big Tweed, an’ I’d like to give you a bite of my sandwich.” He produced from his pocket an object wrapped in oilcloth, but young Webb already was shaking his head vehemently.

  Big Tweed looked hurt. He returned the sandwich to the pocket of his soiled sport coat and, in a surprisingly agile sweep of the arm, he snatched up the bottle at Webb’s side. “I could stand the favor of a drink, though,” he told Webb.

  The young man’s jaw dropped. “Give me that!”

  Big Tweed upended the paper-wrapped container and sucked greedily. Webb lunged for it. The old bum gagged and spewed the clear liquid onto the sidewalk, causing two passing ladies to avert their eyes and quicken their pace. As the two men tussled, the bottle fell to the concrete with a dull thwack. Moisture darkened the wrapping.

  Big Tweed issued a mournful “Aww.” Webb listened in horror as his bottle began to hiss. The inner cannister had spilled and the chemicals were mixing.

  Mentally, Webb began counting backward.

  Five seconds…

  He grabbed the bottle in his right hand and stood.

  Four seconds…

  Webb looked about the crowded street.

  Three seconds…

  He spied a large metal trash bin twenty feet away and began to sprint.

  Two seconds…

  As he slammed the bottle over the rim of the dumpster, it exploded—earlier than he had hoped—into an enormous column of flame that blackened the glass of the streetlight above. Passersby backed away, puzzled, wondering if the blast had been intended as some holiday amusement—fireworks, perhaps, gone awry?

  Against the wall, three other ragged revolutionaries grabbed up their bottles and disappeared into the crowd.

  Gasping for air, young Webb assessed the personal damage: hair and eyebrows singed away, right cheek scorched black and beginning to sting. Part of his shirt had been burned away at the center of his chest. And then he looked at his right hand.

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  28

  Deep in the Bumpers

  Please believe, I would not be scripting at this moment if I could sleep. My ankle and knees joints are howling, and I took a smack in the face during the march today that leaves my top lip a split and swollen mess. A tooth is loose, hinging in my mouth like a spring door.

  I’m now halfway down my last bottle of Moberly’s ale. It tastes a gag of brush root, but it’s deadening the pain.

  Ho, the march. It wears on Pec-Pec not a whit. He bounds across the mountainside ahead of us following a trail that is apparent to none but him, then dances back—breathless more from exhilaration than exertion—to tell us what’s up ahead for miles. The magic man is jubilant. His people are gathered, he says, and the canyon we seek is less than a week into the bumpers. There is a bullet to be found, he says, an ancient bullet in the hands of the Government. Ho, when he speaks of it I always lose the sense of him.

  Tha’Enton is an odd buck from a south-center Rafer tribe. I gully that Pec-Pec is a god to him, but most times he stays distant with his guard duty. Last night, though, I witnessed what I took to be a religious rite between the two. They faced off, cross-legged. Pec-Pec spoon-fed to the warrior a small bowl of his bean soup, which none other of us will allow within nose’s range. The talk between them was fast and raspy, like trees what rattle and snap in a windstorm.

  We have a dozen beasts among us like I have never seen, llamas they are called. I imagine they are shrunken and furry horses what grew out of the radiation fields. What’s most peculiar is that the llamas can speak—they make words, anyway, which I doubt they understand. Pec-Pec says the beasts to be quite intelligent, even though they gully not our language so well. They lean toward hornery, and tolerate humans only so far as need be for food and protection.

  Six of the llamas are devoted solely to the hefting of hardware brought along by a sour old poker, name of Rosenthal Webb. He worries more over his cartons of hand bombs than he would a pregnant wife.

  Webb says he’s the one what sent money from the revolutionaries to Camp Blade. I had to fess the full story to him—how I really had made a bollocks of Nora Londi, and once I got the money I killed the Badger named Sgt. Krieger. The revenge I took was why I really had to flee, although Pec-Pec has given me hope of making right with Nora. Webb seemed pig-grin pleased to hear of the pounded Badger, and that was when he pounded my face. I found myself flat on my backpack, rolling among the rocks, with this gray-head rubbing his knuckles above me, saying, “That’s for the lie, horse prick.” And he hasn’t spoken to me since.

  Webb is a fright even to his assistant, a bucker name of Gregory. He told me before sacking out tonight that Webb had dillied with the facts some to get approval for his mission—that the official purpose was to hide me—but now it’s clear Webb wants to ram a banger up the Monitor’s canal.

  If we must keep this up a week, then I am destined to be most miserable. At the rate I am losing possessions and taking a bashing, I will be nothing but a large naked bruise at the end of the trek.

  —Anton Takk

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  29

  The Bullet

  Nora Londi did not trust this floor. It was neither wood nor stone. It was cracked and weathered, like an old man’s skin, gapped in places and showing poured concrete underneath. If the Monitor were to be believed, it once glistened in one continuous sheen. But the Monitor had many a wild story in his ugly head.

  She followed his galumphing white figure around the dim corridor until they came to an open hatchway. The Monitor pointed to the hatch door, which was open and shredded at the edges, resembling the lid torn from a sardine can.

  “An ancient security cover,” the Monitor grumbled, moisture gurgling in his throat. “It took me weeks just to get to the Bullet, but I knew I had to, if the old legends were true.”

  “Let’s see this Bullet,” Londi said, “and get on with it. I’d like to see the outside again. These walls feel so … close.”

  The Monitor ducked his head and forced his large frame through the hole. The red-haired logger followed and found herself standing on a circular catwalk. In the center of the catwalk, all right, was a Bullet—a very, very large Bullet. Metal. Painted white and blue and red. The size of a 200-year-old tree, pointed at the top, dozens of feet above. Below, where the Bullet widened slightly, were fins like the feathers of an arrow.

  The tiniest boot-scrape on the catwalk produced ghostly echoes in the cylindrical room. The air smelled of decay, and some kind of foul burning that Londi associated with electricity.

  “Here.” The Monitor motioned with a wave of one pale hand and pointed down over the railing. “This is one of my early discov
eries of which I was quite proud. You see the opening near the bottom—where a cable is running into the Bullet? Making that hookup was the result of months of frustrating deliberation.”

  “Oh, then congratulations.”

  “It is that hookup that allowed those thinker boxes you saw analyze the innards of the Bullet. I still have no idea why it won’t fly.”

  “‘Cause it’s illegal to fly. Oh yeah—and impossible.”

  The Monitor snorted.

  “But I’m sure you could just bong over to New Chicago and pick up spare parts from a hardware store. Like I fixed a tractor once,” Londi said.

  The Monitor grumbled and leaned against the railing, resting on his muscley forearms. She saw dual reflections of herself in his sunglasses. “You don’t take the Bullet seriously. I am showing you this so that you will understand—understand that you really are at the planet’s center of power. Not just a communications center, not just a clearinghouse for wireless teletype messages, but actually the location of the world’s most powerful weapon. Once I persuade it to fly, anyway. Remember, the fairy tales are true—I am the Monitor.”

  “Impossible. This is ancient junk.”

  “No. You mention spare parts, and I think they might actually be available. You see this room?” The Monitor stamped on the metal catwalk and smiled at the booming echo. “There are a dozen of them just on this hillside—silos, they called them, like grain silos. Eleven of the silos opened, back during the Three-Hour War. You might call it Big Bang Day. Ten Bullets like this one actually flew. One other stayed in its silo and is now a pile of rust. And this twelfth silo never opened. This Bullet never flew. And never rusted.”

  “Then this is a Bullet that misfired,” Londi said. “If the ancients could not fire it, you could never hope to.”

  “It is possible,” said the Monitor slowly, “that the ancients never intended to fire this one, that it was held back for strategic reasons. And that it is ready to fire even now.

  “But if it does need repair, well, somewhere there has to be another Bullet. There were thousands just in the nearby sectors. When I know what I need, I will find the parts. It is just the final step in a long process.”

  “Some say that you was born on Big Bang Day,” Londi said, narrowing her eyes. “But I’d give you, oh, forty or forty-five years’ age.”

  “Specifically, four hundred thirty-five years,” the Monitor said, smiling. “The combination of radiation and flesh produces no end of surprises, eh? What was deadly for all others was a source of longevity for me, it seems.”

  “But you haven’t been in this canyon for…”

  “Here? Oh, certainly not—I’ve been here a relative handful of years. You see, a man with a face like mine has to learn the art of behind-the-scenes manipulation—I couldn’t govern publicly, could I?”

  “Well, maybe—”

  “No. Huh. Not possible. It’s a lesson I learned early—my rearing was in an ad hoc orphanage, and a large and ugly rugger grows powerful in that environment if matters are handled in the right way. This was in a charred-out university. I set up shop in the library—scarcely left, had runners to break fingers for me.

  “When I first came of age, I was a man of basements and back rooms, hired former longshoremen to do my bidding. If their tongues got too loose I would nick them out. That was early on down east, outside of Chautown, before the city-states were united.”

  Londi rubbed the bulb of her nose and squinted skeptically. “Umm, have we covered a hunnerd years of this yet?”

  “Hah! Well, say, a hundred fifty years by then. Look, I have a small confession: I am a brilliant ruler in my own right, of course, but the fact is that I amassed an enormous amount of power simply by outliving all of the other politicians.

  “But then came the electronic communication. It united the continent again and allowed me to operate even more remotely. I move often, you see, to stay ahead of those that would try to destroy me. But as long as I command the Government by wireless, what does it matter where I am physically?”

  “So now you live in a hole in the mountains and you have one large Bullet,” Londi observed. “Who will you shoot with your one Bullet? And what then?”

  He coughed, spat over the rail, and then chortled, low. “We don’t have the planet to ourselves. Yet. There are nearly five million people here in Merqua alone, a population growing all of the time. We have cities again where people speak of crowding as they haven’t done for four hundred years—New Chicago, for instance, and Chautown.

  “Overseas, past the Eastern Ocean—you hear the stories, don’t you?—there are other, aggressive people, their numbers growing as well. Humans with their own ways, their own governments—and we know from ancient history what will happen once both governments have the means to travel freely from one land to another.”

  The Monitor fell silent for a moment, hoping the significance would sink in. “One well-placed Bullet at this time in history could set another civilization back centuries. We are blessed with this one large spear bequeathed to us by a glitch of ancient times. With its proper use, we can gain absolute superiority.”

  “You seem awfully eager to fire your Bullet,” Londi said.

  The Monitor coughed out a laugh. “It’s those friends of yours, I suppose, that put me on edge—Anton Takk and his lot. Ya. I get wireless reports from Security, from innkeepers, from scavengers: Your fools have reached the mountains by now, and they’ve been moving in our direction, not northward to Blue Hole as I had first thought. They take bearing with such uncommon accuracy that I think it not coincidence.

  “Oh, your friends will die easily,” he added wearily. “But if they know the location of this canyon, then perhaps others do, too. So yes, I’d like the Bullet to fly before I pull up stakes here. It’d be a pity to leave such a beautiful instrument still in the ground.”

  Londi peered up again, and imagined the stark blue sky that would be visible just beyond the silo cover.

  “Before you take over the world, you’ll have to figure out how to get the lid off this can,” she said.

  “It opens,” the Monitor said.

  “Oh? How?”

  There was no answer.

  Well, Londi told herself, then perhaps there’s a way out of here.

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  30

  No Report

  The Monitor pondered the sparse readout on his computer terminal:

  Code: A05-42 Brimley

  Destination: Monitor/Eyes only

  Routing: SATline II/Scramble

  Origin: New Chicago Central Wireless/Linex 3

  Message: Kerbaugh, Mick. Inspector.

  Status: No report.

  The Monitor tapped two keys, and the printer to his right burped out a permanent copy of the dispatch.

  He pressed his right fist into his left hand, and four knuckles popped. Always the same. No report. Wearily he flipped off the terminal and removed his mirrored sunglasses, not needing the special lenses to read anymore. To human eyes, the room was now pitch black—but merely a soothing twilight to the Monitor. It was a small chamber, dominated by an oval down mattress.

  Every few hours he checked by satellite relay to New Chicago, and for weeks the message had not changed. First Nora Londi had stumbled into the hidden canyon; then Security, hoping to trap the conspirators of fugitive Anton Takk, tricked the warehouseman into fleeing cross-country from New Chicago; now, against regulation, Kerbaugh was not reporting in. Could Takk have doubled back somehow and killed him? He may have killed that Badger sergeant in a fit of fury—but was he capable of a calculated slay?

  The Monitor grunted. Takk, once thought to be a dim-witted crate lifter, now appeared to be a crafty and lethal reprobate. How could Security not have known this? Maybe Kerbaugh had suffered the brunt of his own department’s failing. Hmm. Yes.

  There could not be a more meticulous and efficient Inspector than Kerbaugh. But even at his last report by wireless something was
going wrong. The Monitor opened a folder and shuffled through a thin stack of computer printouts to find it:

  Code: A02-33 Kerbaugh

  Destination: Monitor/Eyes only

  Routing: SATline II/Scramble

  Origin: Fallstown Inn wireless/Linex 44E94

  Message: Takk covering tracks. Subject murdered inn owner Moberly and Transportation escort Papier at last stop. Building and press burned per procedure. In pursuit.

  Murdered the inn owner? Really?

  Takk. Papier. Kerbaugh. All were faceless names that the Monitor had manipulated from hundreds of miles away. Something like a chess match, no? There was power in that anonymity, and safety in distance. But these recent events would not do.

  The Monitor pushed his chair back, rolled onto the bed, and studied the minute crystals in the ceiling rock. The thought of relocating his hidden headquarters made him tired. He had done it dozens of times, of course—forty years here, fifty there—and each time the logistics grew more complex. Exhausting. He must be mortal after all.

  But if he must eventually abandon the canyon, what about his beautiful Bullet? It must fly soon. And perhaps it actually was ready to fly. Trajectory was programmed and guidance systems seemed operational. Warhead was intact, from what he could tell. Fuel was purified and reloaded. Engine and electronics all seemed fine in hands-on inspection.

  All that he lacked was confirmation from the computer diagnostics programming left behind by the ancients. The Monitor had spent months reviewing the yellowed manuals line by line, rechecking the diagnostic linkups with the Bullet, and running the program again and again. The terminal screen would blink and flash with a rapid-fire array of component diagrams, a blizzard of algebraic nonsense, and then a sequence of geometric shapes. Finally the computer would blip up the single intelligible message to be gleaned from the program, one infuriatingly unspecific evaluation: