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27: Education

Grandfather had been the one who claimed to fly. He had put the youngster Tommie on his lap (the nickname Big Tom came later, with his ample belly) and angled his open hand into a beach wind flecked with spray and sand. He explained there on the wind-creaking deck how a ton of steel could rise off the ground under its own power.

But Grandfather also told him the story about Jagger and the Beanstalk. And that men had walked on the moon. Hoo.

So Grandfather, the daft, old man with legs bowed and vibrating, told the youngster how he had climbed into a canvas and bamboo carriage with a twirling shaft on its nose, and had crashed the contraption into the welcoming swells of the Big Ocean.

Grandfather let on, the breeze tugging at his scrappy tufts of hair, that his very experiments had brought the Monitor to decree that flight by humans was impossible. And, furthermore, illegal. Humankind could not benefit by flight out over the unknown waters.

Big Tom spent his childhood ship-baiting on these narrow islands running parallel to the mainland coast. The Outre Banks. As the youngest male of the family it became his ten o'clock chore, just before bedtime, to hang a lantern from a mule's neck, and lead the beast up and down the beachside dunes.

In the dark chill of early next morning, he would find a baffled and bedraggled wet captain in the kitchen regaling the adults of the family with the story of a ghostly, bobbing buoy that had signaled safe harbor to his ship when there was none. Of course, come daylight the unfortunate captain's beached skimmer would be found—picked clean even of its brass fittings.

Father and Grandfather would be quite demonstrative in their outrage at the seaman's misfortune, tossing fistfuls of sand and cursing to the rising sun. Then they would sell the soggy captain some rotting sculler, and he would make his way homeward with tales of the killer ghosts of the sand dunes on the appropriately named Outre Banks. Once, they even sold a captain his own lifeboat, freshly repainted.

Big Tom had worked the mule trick for his family two years before he realized he should demand a share of the booty. He immediately began to collect a small percentage of the spoils—sure, why hadn't he asked before, Grandfather wanted to know. And with that, Big Tom took his first step into adulthood. The misty fantasy of childhood began to fade, and it was perhaps coincidental that at about that time he saw his first Government man.

Grandfather had been hearing tall tales about the Monitor since his own childhood, so the bull-faced, three-headed ruler already would have been impossibly old by the time Big Tom was a professional boat-baiter. This age business led Big Tom, in his maturing wisdom, to conclude that the famously secretive and paranoid Monitor was actually a succession of furtive rulers, perhaps a family dynasty not unlike his band of Outre Banks scalawags.

The Government man arrived in a little borrowed sailboat he had awkwardly tacked across the inner sound from the mainland. McTaggart was his name. He was a smooth talker, pasty-faced, thirty-five or so. His eyes glowed with the fire of a true believer as he preached of the imminent arrival of order in the outlands, as he called them. The frontier. There was a bustling new capital in the middle lands, New Chicago. There was commerce. Defense and security. Work assignments for all.

(This was old news to Grandfather, who grumbled that New Chicago was supposed to be a pitiful crosshatch of mud ruts. But nothing about the Government had pleased Grandfather since it declared that flight was impossible a couple of decades before.)

The Government man made vague references to the pirates who would no longer terrorize such innocents as the inhabitants of this little coastal fishing community—that was how they subsisted, wasn't it—fishing? Grandfather nodded yes, uneasy as the Government man scratched notes into a little book.

And then the emissary McTaggart wobbled back into his sailboat and floated away. No other Government men were seen for three or four years.

They did see, however, an increasing traffic of drifters—the first of them mere malcontents uncomfortable with the growing influence of Government where once there was a robust survival-by-wit. Many of them bought boats, any old dory that would carry their bobbing souls a few miles down the coast. As the fleeing men and women grew more desperate over the years, heartier craft were in demand. As a young adult, Big Tom took to designing and building twenty-and thirty-foot skimmers—quickly and roughly pounded together—and selling them at outrageously inflated prices.

In the year that Grandfather died McTaggart returned, and Big Tom was glad that the old man was not around to see this. A large chunk of coastland, including the Outre Banks, were now part of Government District Eight; with McTaggart its governor—actually, the only lawman at all.

McTaggart was going gray now, earlier than most, his face eaten by the sun and an inch-long scar curving up the right side of his lip, bitten there by a panicking runner. He arrived in an odd contraption, a boat twenty feet long but without mast or sail. At the stern there chugged an engine, mechanically related to those in the land-autos that were now grinding up the trails of the mainland, it was said.

The Government man lifted the lid of the engine for Big Tom to see the inner workings of "the little whore-banger," as he called it. Big Tom grunted admiration. McTaggart said that there would be no engines licensed for civilian boats. And Big Tom agreed that that would be a good thing. Privately, he envied the potential of the throbbing machine, but he began to see rather clearly how Big Bang Day had come about.

Big Tom had begun to carry a hip flask, a flat silverplated number bartered away by a well-heeled desperado. He and McTaggart traded nips there on the sound-side dock and the Government man used his loosened jaw, eventually, to complain about the frustrations of overseeing an outland territory, one more populated by people fleeing the Government than loyal to it.

Big Tom harumphed a few sympathetic sounds, passed the bourbon a few more times, and almost mortally gagged when McTaggart told him: "I know this, that ya sells sea craft to the disloyals."

"Ho, now. . .."

"Awww, hold on. You're a solid, longtime local. An' by the way, sorry to hear of the old man."

"He didn't care much fer the Gumment, ta be honest."

"Like I say," McTaggart continued, "I'm not in a choicey situation, our sector being in its infant stages. But the Monitor says that part of the mandate of the outland governors is to stop the runners. Grab 'em, ship 'em back for labor assignments."

"Hmmph."

"And I have no security force as yet, but a budget for bounties."

"Ah," the young Big Tom said, imagining the body of Grandfather just now being sheet-wrapped to a slab of slate that would carry him to the ocean floor. "And just how much would that bounty be?"

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Framed