The Dream Vessel by Jeff Bredenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

Behind a marred and littered desk he saw a middle-aged man, wild haired and scrawny, with one of those tiny torches in one hand and an ugly banger in the other. He was grumbling something, like the sound of barking dogs, in that tongue of the Fungus People.
    Saple could taste the tension, but his order was not being obeyed. He ran his forefinger across the two triggers, one for each barrel. The problem could be resolved so quickly, safely: Blam. But a few more problems would be created. The mess. And an inquiry about the banger, a slaver’s weapon found but not returned. Could he prove it was not stolen?
    Saple tried again. “Mayhap you know that I’m blind—these eyes are whiter than stones, I’m told. But you’ll be asking yerself why it is that I’m able to point this blaster right at your coconuts, huh?” He waved the gun toward the chair. “Sit there, or soon you’ll have to squat to pee.”
    Quince understood the motion, at least, and sat, his nerves still howling. “There…there was no light on in the house,” the Rafer said in his own language. “I meant no harm. I needed…food, maybe clothes—yes, I had a mind to steal—but I would be gone then, quickly.”
    The bushy face of the Fungus Person showed astonishment, then thought. And Quince got another surprise. This time, when the blind man spoke his words sounded smooth and warm, not like the barking dogs at all. The sense of them was halting, but understandable. It seemed so odd to see a Fungus Person speaking Rafer. Unnatural. Like watching a poorly operated marionette.
    “You are Rafer,” the Fungus Person was saying, “and now I think I understand. There is only one Rafer on Thomas Island who is even close to a free man, and you are not him. That would mean you are a runner. You have broken out of the cells?”
    “Yes…well, not quite,” Quince replied, deciding that the man with the gun was not going to be deceived. “From the infirmary. They had thought that I was vomiting blood—which I was, but not from hemorrhage. I had swallowed blood to feign such an illness.”
    “And once in the hospital, they ignored you—thinking that you had the belly rot?” Saple held firm to the snub gun propped on the desk, trying to assess the danger. He touched the dwindling striker match to the wick of the desk candle.
    “Oh, more than that,” Quince said, enjoying a chance to tell of his cleverness, even under the circumstances. “When I stopped breathing, I was taken for dead and wheeled to a cooler-room.”
    Saple snorted. “You fooled the doctor—the big one, Scaramouch—with that? He knows of Rafer breathing, this scuba that some of you have. He has vowed to make a medical study of it.”
    Quince looked puzzled. “It was just another of the jailers watching me in the hospital. He said that the doctor could not be found. He was distraught, actually—saying that this Big Tom of yours would be violently angry that another of us was dying. But there was no big doctor.”
    “Then you are lucky to have gotten this far—to the sea, the boats. But now, as you must know, you will die if you are caught, even though Big Tom will not be able to profit from selling you to the mainland. An example to the others—that’s the thinking.”
    “You are releasing me?”
    Saple sighed and raised the snub gun, pointing its jagged maw at the ceiling. “Yes. I think so.”
    “Why? This could bring you trouble, no?”
    “It would bring me trouble only if I were found out,” Saple said, struggling to find the correct Rafer words. “But no matter. I am not faithful to Big Tom. He put my eyes out for articles that I wrote when I first arrived on the island, articles about his selling of red-leggers—Rafers, other runners from the mainland.”
    “You, too, are a scribe? But who would read such articles if they are not allowed? Certainly not mainlanders, where the Government is buying humans for farm work.”
    Saple sighed. How could he possibly explain it