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12: The Linguists

The blind journalist and poet Jersey Saple had thrust himself into his sun reader outside his rotting ramshack near the beach. The sun reader was shaped like a storm-blown tent, a box made of thick scrap, sail canvas and wood framing. To follow the path of the sun it pivoted atop a length of piling left over from dock construction. The sandy yard was dotted with caugi cactus, but Saple's feet never encountered their unforgiving needles, either from a gift of "vision" or a gift of memory.

He withdrew his head of tangle-hair from the dark frame, letting the cover shroud, which was tacked to the top of the box, flop over the hole he had occupied. In an exacting motion, he turned his head twenty degrees to the left and shouted, "Ho! It's Billister, at seventy-five feet!"

The throaty reply that came indeed was young Billister: "Oh, clearly I made it to fifty feet. You should have your eyes checked."

Saple harumphed, mushed through the sand to the opposite side of the sun reader, and there he released the latches that held a square frame to the back side of the box. He slid a pinpricked sheet of parchment out of the frame and returned it to the portfolio lying at his feet. He selected another page, clipped it into the frame and latched it back onto the box.

"I can never keep these writings separate," he grumbled. "Specially those what come before the coder system I started punching into the bottom corners—mmm—back eighteen months or so."

The wirey man reentered the box up to the waist, with the shroud down his shoulders. As his sweat-dripping nose brushed along the sheet of paper stretched across the back of the box, his damaged eyes could just make out the patterns of searing sun dots poked through it. He heard just outside the sun reader the rustle of a tote bag laden with canned goods and fruit being eased into the sand. He swallowed, thankful.

Billister was at his side now, and the young Rafer heard the muffled voice inside the box declare, "This is the one! Hoo, I'll mark it now. The theories we discussed—what, two years ago?—I was telling ya the principles of voting what the ancients used."

Billister watched as the blind man felt about for the oil cloth sack he had laid next to the post of the sun reader. It was a ritual they never spoke of anymore—a few tins and pieces of fruit pilfered from the larder of the mainhouse. Saple tried his hand at surf fishing and container gardening, but it was not enough to keep even a slender old hermit alive.

Assured of dinner, Saple returned to his reading. Fidgeting, Billister drew a sheet out of the portfolio that had been flopped in the sand. He held it up against the midday sun, admiring the precise rows of clustered dots. "One day you should teach to me your prick writing," he said, louder than usual to penetrate the canvas.

Saple grunted and tore the shroud off his back. "We will call it dot writing, please. It is a visual form of Braille, the tactile writing used by blind people way back when. By night I can write—all I need is stylus and paper. But daytime is the only time that I can read. For these sorry eyes, it takes the pure strength of the sun to penetrate the punctures I have put into the paper—the dot writing. Please, not 'prick writing.' More proper it would be to call what you do 'prick thinking.' Hah. I like it! I will write it up tonight: 'Billister, prick thinker of Thomas Island. . ..'"

"But I'm serious," Billister said, rattling the parchment—Saple tolerated his habit of making unnecessary noises to announce where he was standing. "What is the point in having a library of writings that no one else in the world can translate?"

"It is a good question that, ahhh—" here Saple switched to the softer sounds of the Rafer tongue "—that there is no safe answer for. I lost my eyes for scripting much less than is recorded on these pages. There will be a use for them someday, ya, but for now they will just be my recollection, my second brain. Okay? Besides, knowing the dot writing would be even less use to you than that Latin what you've been studying."

"You wish you could read at night—why not just feel the holes with your fingers," Billister asked, "the way blind people among the ancients did?"

Saple held a withered hand aloft. "With these old bones? Hmph. Blood circulation bad as it is, I'm lucky I can feel well enough to find my pud. Besides, the Braille the ancients had was raised bumps. Much easier to feel than tiny holes in paper."

Billister picked a sand burr from between two toes. He decided to drop the subject, although he continued to speak Rafer. "I heard that there was an escape the other night," he said slowly.

"Quince—that was his name."

"Then it is true, that the bulliards found him here. That you had spoken to him?"

"There's not a thing ullegal, ya know, about having your home broken into by an escaped red-legger." In a shadowy kind of way, perhaps borne of imagination, Jersey Saple could see the young Rafer before him, shaved head nodding now sullenly.

"They doused him, ya know. He is dead."

"I know," Saple interrupted.

". . .for killing the doctor, Scaramouch. . ."

"He'd a died the same just for the escape." There was a palpable death of enthusiasm between the two friends. Saple pulled the hair away from his face distractedly, trying to make the salty scraggles stay matted to the sides. It was a habit left over from sighted days, pulling hair out of his face. When Billister turned to leave, the writer reached out and clapped him accurately on the left shoulder, stopping him.

"You must know," Saple said, "that there was nothing I could do to save the man. I was sending him up to take Murdoch's boat when they surrounded the house. My only regret is that we dallied briefly in discussion. A few extra minutes, and. . ." The journalist's voice was low, almost a whisper, even though they were the only free men on the island to know the language.

Billister sniffed and walked toward the beach.

Saple stood helpless, knobby knees poking into the sunlight from ragged holes in his drawstring trousers. "Not a thing I could do, Billister, but I give ya this—he didn't kill Dr. Scaramouch. I'd mentioned the doctor to him in passing that night—and Quince had never heard of the blubber-butt bastard!"

The blind man heard the footsteps pause in the sand, and then he tracked their silent progress southeast—fifty feet, seventy-five, ninety. . ..

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Framed