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8: A Runner, A Writer

Quince scrabbled through a jungle of bougainvillea, not daring to take the dirt-and-shell road that wound down the hillside from the medical buildings. He paused, kneeling in the blackness, listening for any human noises through the riot of creeking tree frogs. There were no signs of humanity, save for his own heavy breathing, sounding like rhythmic sobs.

START JERE He peeled off his hospital gown, a smock so tattered that it really covered little of the body. He mopped his brow with it, then rolled it and tucked it under his arm. Dark skin made a better night cover. Scratches be damned—it was better to have a few thorns in the fanny than to risk recapture. Red-leggers fared badly enough as it was; red-leggers who dared to break out before sale to the mainland, it was said, would suffer a cruel torture at the hands of the pig-poker-in-chief, Big Tom. His walled garden at the mainhouse was renowned for that.

When Quince hit the beach he rested again. The sand was still warm from the day's sun-scorching, but the night sea breeze here in the open was a relief. His stomach was twisting—a wretched mixture of anxiety and the sourness of the blood he had swallowed to simulate sickness. He crouched in the shadows of the jungly shrubs at the beach's edge and tried to decide his next move.

I am just a scribe, Quince thought to himself resolutely. I make stories, I write history, I teach. This is work for a warrior, a hunter. Perhaps Dirk was right. I will die on this island. He pictured his friend in that cell over the ridge of Crown Mountain—dull-minded Dirk, the steady laborer, determined to ship quietly to a farm worker's life on the mainland. Who was right?

Just east up the beach, barely 300 yards away, were the shipyards and main docks. Tied up there, among Big Tom's little skimmers, were the three barges and their tug lashed together, black against the glistening waves. Capture by Big Tom's marauding beasts was a miserable enough experience. But it was said to be a pleasure cruise compared to the barge ride to the mainland. Those few red-leggers who escaped the mainland and returned to the Out Islands carried back nightmarish tales of this Captain Bull and his pig-poking enforcers with their billybangers and snub shotguns.

To the west the beach buildings were more sparse, decrepit little ramshacks dotting the west side of the harbor for miles. The choice of directions came easily, if for no other reason than Quince's instinctive repulsion for the slave barges. West. He would find supplies in one of the shanties, then steal a boat and skim away.

 

Jersey Saple knew that someone was approaching his house from the beach path. It was as if an extra sense had awakened in him over his ten years of blindness. Especially in territory familiar to him—his house, the garden and outhouse area in back, or the boardwalk and twenty yards of scrubland out front running down to the beach—Saple could even identify the intruder before he had a chance to rap on the splintery door sometimes, if he knew him well.

This extra sense could be explained scientifically, he supposed, as the old blubberburst Dr. Scaramouch huffily insisted. Perhaps in his perpetual visual haze—dim light during the day and blackness at night—Saple had become attuned to infinitesimally small sounds, or vibrations, or odors, that never registered with sighted people.

Perhaps so. But Saple liked the charm of something more mystical—the idea that he had acquired a gift of vision somehow. The Jesus People, or even the Rafers, would say that it was God given in compensation for his unjust blinding. Ah, that was a much better story, Dr. Scaramouch, a much better story.

So it was that in the perfect stillness of his threadbare study, Saple "watched" the approach of this stranger from the beach. He was not only unable to identify this person—mmm, it is a man, he was sure now—but he quickly became convinced that they had never met. The man's bearing, his way of carrying himself, his attitude, were absolutely foreign.

Oddly, the stranger seemed to be avoiding the boardwalk, risking the wrath of caugi cactus, hooker weed and shell fragments against his bare feet. Bare feet. Hmm, not only bare feet, but Saple was not sure that the intruder was wearing any clothing at all.

The stranger was lingering now at the front door, a simple ill fitting frame of silvery wood that served little purpose but to hold a swath of rusted metal screening over the entry—which kept out those bugs that weren't particularly intent on getting inside anyway. The visitor's hesitation did not last long. He simply pulled at the door handle and let himself in.

Saple's curiosity advanced into a state of alarm. On Thomas Island, courtesy and legality were strictly observed, as the penalties for infractions (usually, as interpreted by Big Tom) were severe. A gouged tongue, perhaps, or a severed hand. Or, as Saple found out not long after arriving, blindness. For the first time since detecting the intruder, Saple moved—he pushed back against the rollers of his desk chair and came to an accurate stop at the floor cabinet behind him. He opened it.

The intruder was still in the tiny front room, where Saple had a hammock strung for sleeping and the walls were banked with disheveled shelves of books, folders of loose papers and odd bits of wood and twisted metal scavenged from the shore.

Now he is a burglar, Saple mused, and I can blow his belly out with nay a warning shot. The blind man's hands were shaking under the weight of his snub shotgun, so he propped the short, ghastly barrel on his desk, nudged among his latest writings on alternative forms of government.

The weapon had washed up two days after a minor capsize in the harbor. Saple had broken a toe on it during an evening jaunt and spent the next day brushing and oiling the rust away. Now it would have its first firing, and Saple found himself hoping the charge would not blast out each end with equal force. A banger of such minimal craftsmanship could really be trusted only by a person standing far to the side of its barrel. It was a cool night out, but Saple could feel the sweat trickling into his beard.

He waited until the invader was well into the study, too far to escape back into the front room and out the door. There. Saple lit one of the striker matches that he kept around for the convenience of guests and held its tiny roar aloft in the blackness.

"Ho, there," he said to the frozen figure before him, "sit down aback a you in the chair, and move slow or I'll be painting that wall red at your expense."

Quince's nerves were screaming from the shock of surprise, but his tongue was wooden, mute. 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 all?

"Well, yes, I have been many kinds of scribe in my life. Both for the Government and for—well, those who call themselves the Ungovernment. I came to Thomas Island as an itinerant Government bureaucrat, writing inspection reports mostly, for the Department of Transport out of New Chicago. It was quite dry material, really. I would much prefer writing poetry when—"

"A poet! I should have guessed!"

Saple grunted. "Well, during my travels I had developed a rather bifurcated career, you see. The Transport reports went to New Chicago, and the poetry circulated among less reputable audiences. I found that using a pseudonym, I could express frustration in my poetry that was never vented in my Government assignments. Then I began writing articles, too, about the conditions I had found during my travels. Not all mainlanders believe in the slaving, you know—or the Government at all. There are Revolutionaries—no one with much power, mind you—but it was them that I was writing the articles for. To be circulated among the Revolutionaries, to inspire them."

"But one of these Revolutionaries betrayed you?"

Saple shrugged. "I think the Department of Inspection simply put two and two together, finally. I was assigned to Thomas Island when they did, and the inspectors sent notice to Big Tom—asked him to settle the matter. So Big Tom searched my possessions and found notes I had been gathering about his slaving company."

"And still he did not kill you?"

"No, he just ever-so-mercifully burned my eyes out. Now, he allows me to dwell in this abandoned ramshack, and even looks the other way when his house boy smuggles provisions to me. Big Tom is an odd poker, a curious mixture sometimes of violence and beneficence. A mind doctor could spend his career on Big Tom."

"How is it that you speak Rafer? Do all of these Revolutionaries speak our tongue somehow? We had thought it impossible for. . .excuse me, but your race is known as the Fungus People."

The blind man laughed. "No. I learned it from Big Tom's house boy. He taught me his language and I taught him mine, even how to write—which is something I can not manage in Rafer."

Quince squirmed in his chair. "I should find a boat quickly," he said. "Can you afford to give me food?"

"Not necessary. A mile west, near the point, you will find the skimmer of a fisherman named Murdoch. He keeps it well stocked for long hauls. But. . .oh, gawd. . .." Saple's lids closed over his milky eyes. He sensed movement again down the yard, near the beach, and his heart shrank as he recognized the figures striding toward the house. He rolled back on the chair to the floor cabinet, shoved the banger inside and slid the door closed. "Go! Now!"

The last two words were shouted in the Fungus People's tongue, but Quince read the panic quite accurately and sprinted out of the ramshack. Down the hill, silhouetted against the glowing beach, were three tall men with snub shotguns glinting in the moonlight. There was nowhere to run.

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