DOWN IN THE corrugated bulkheads, down
among bulwark stays and bilge strakes, derrick post and screw shaft, down in
the iron darkness, the vessel moans in the breeze, sings to its single crew
member. He sleeps in a seaman's birth towards the stern. He turns and mutters.
He sweats. He grinds his teeth and dreams the apocalypse, the dimness and the
low bruised clouds and shafts of sunlight white on the pan and the four riders
coming and the hooves of their horses as they beat on the earth speak like
thunder.
Jack Delfan
sits up naked and wide-eyed in his bunk. He reaches for the rope-pull that
works the bulb above. Its light comes slow and blue and his eyes narrow beneath
the crags of his brow. Eyebrows pulling together as his head inclines to aid
his hearing. Of that distant and urgent… drumming? That ... approaching … vehicle?
He
climbs a long clanging journey up emergency ladders on hold pillars and
transverse girders. He arrives at deck level through a hatchway of his own
devising, the round and bolted lid lifting on its hinge and the prophet's head
emerging. Accompanied by the venerable barrel of a .577 Westley Richards Nitro
Express hunting rifle. He stares out at the metal plain, the red dunes beyond.
A zephyr whispering in the wires of the lift rig. A cable clanking. His head turning
to port and then to starboard and he clambers naked yet onto the deck and
canters to the starboard rail. He looks down. Just sand. And then the pan and
beyond that sand again. He frowns. He lifts his heavy head, nostrils funnelling
in molecules alien to his chosen purlieus. Analysing them in the mucus of his
cranial cavities. A smell of the world he came from. He lifts the rifle and
checks the massive round in its chamber. He strides across the deck to the lift
rig and leans over the port rail. It's there, blades retracted. Some fifty
yards beyond the rapture tree and the little circle of rocks where three
lengths of ironwood smoulder in the ashes. A gleaming black ovoid. Like the
tanker has turned goose and started laying.
Jack
Delfan climbs the wooded stile and steps onto the crude railed platform of the
lift. He releases the brake and drops with chains roaring in their pulleys,
resonating in glooming holds within. He bends his knees for the impact of the
earth and takes it and he opens the gate in the rail and steps onto the sand
with weapon held ready. His eyes catching a movement at the trunk of the
rapture tree and the stock coming up to his shoulder and Jack Delfan sees the
Partner step out with hands held carefully aloft. A lean and whimsical figure
all garbed in solartect.
Hello,
Jack, he says.
The
patriarch’s knees are slightly bent, his weight balanced and like his breathing
functioning in service of the sights which remain fixed on a point between the
Partner’s eyes.
What
want you?
Offer
a friend a drink?
Delfan
gestures with his head towards the egg.
You
don’t carry refreshment in that abomination?
I
was hoping you’d have something artisanal.
Jack
Delfan lifting the barrel to indicate a leather bag that hangs from a branch
above the Partner’s head.
Try
that.
What
is it?
Qhilika.
I’m
sorry?
Mead.
Ah.
The
Partner smiling at this eccentricity. Reaching up to take the bag from its rope
cradle and bring it down and remove the cork. Lifting the mouth piece to take
in aromas and smile again. And drink.
Fantastic.
He
wipes his lips with the back of this hand and feels about his mouth with his
tongue.
The
chewy bits?
Bee
grubs.
The
Partner leaning to spit a fragment upon the sand. He straightens to look,
regretful, at his friend.
It’s
hard to talk when you standing there naked with a gun on me, Jack.
I
wasn’t expecting visitors.
Would
it have made a difference?
How
much tax does the secretariat compute me to owe?
The
Partner shaking a rueful head.
It’s
not about the tax, Jack. Not directly.
So
why are you here?
I’ve
brought something for you. But we can’t do this while you’ve got that
blunderbuss pointing at me. It’s dangerous. And you really should have some
trousers on.
Jack
Delfan lowering the .577. The Partner turning towards the egg. A hum coming
from the thing as a hatch slides open. And the midwife steps out in her
solartect gear and Jack Delfan sees that she carries an infant in her arms who
waves his arms and stares about and smiles.
Da,
he says. Da.
Delfan’s
eyes like those of a man hallucinating. All the universe reduced in his mind to
the small focus of horror which is the babe in its swaddling.
What
the hell is that, he says.
He’s
yours, Jack. Attested by your genes.
Delfan
looking from the Partner to the midwife. Whose eyes are directed in turn at
Delfan’s groin. Where his parts hang large and soft and strangely innocent in a
jungle of curls.
Dear god, she
says.
She walks
across the sand with the boy waving his arms, saying da, da, da.
The orphanage won’t
take him, says the Partner. Administratively, you seem to have disappeared. But
they know you're out here. And they say they lack revenue for orphans.
Delfan
standing outraged with the rifle forgotten in his hand.
And
Eileen?
She’s
an elusive lady.
Delfan’s
head twisting on his neck in the grip of the rage and he turns and lifts the
.577 to align the bore with the midwife’s skull.
I
thought you said we could do this, she says to the Partner, without force.
The
partner smiling, mild and regretful.
He’s
your boy, Jack. I checked the tests myself. Put the gun down.
Jack
Delfan feels the earth's plates shifting on their tides of ore and he knows
that there is no gun that can stop what’s coming.
The
midwife bending to seat the boy in the sand. Where he sways a little before
finding his balance.
Da,
he says.
Yes,
says the midwife.
That
is your father. Dada.
She opens a zip on her thigh pad and
brings out a tablet of clear and finely bevelled silcoplast, offers it to the
Partner.
You
better handle the admin.
The
Partner takes the tablet and it activates at his touch so that its interface
glows and blinks within, seeking contact with the biochips of those about. The
Partner walks across to Jack Delfan who is staring down at the boy.
Jack,
if you can just put your right thumb on the flashing square.
Delfan
looks up at him.
By
way of receipt.
Delfan
lifts his thumb to show a lurid scar.
I
cut it out.
The
Partner, reassuring, offers the tablet.
It doesn’t
matter about the chip. Your prints will be on the system. Just give us your
left thumb.
I sign nothing.
A bellow of such proportions that it elicits a
resonating groan from the hulk.
I
sign nothing.
He
lifts the rifle and releases the safety catch and a fires a round that makes
the great ship ring like a struck gong. The infant staring up at his father
with mouth agape. The silence, when it returns, is prodigious.
I’ll
sort it out on the frame, says the Partner. Speaking to the midwife.
It’s
a sin, she says. It’s a sin that we have to hand this child over to a naked
lunatic.
You’ve
broken the world, roars Jack Delfan. You’ve shattered it.
The
Partner nods.
Goodbye,
Jack.
He
turns and walks towards the egg and the midwife follows him and gets in and
throws out cartons onto the sand.
BiodDeg
diapers, she shouts. Sun screens. Basic infant nutrition. MediGear.
The
cartons coming tumbling to rest, displaying the logo of the secretariat and a
thoughtful message: A gift from the affiliated peoples. Taxes save lives.
Jack Delfan watches the hatch hum shut and the
blades unfurl and start to spin.
How
go your wars, he shouts. And your religions. Have you reintroduced torture
again? Are you using the rack and the screw?
The
midwife’s voice coming strange and amplified over the beat of the rotors. Keep
the child out of the sun. The craft lurching up with sand and leaves and ash
billowing in the bloodshot morning and then it rises above the deck and banks and
skims off across the dunes.
Jack
Delfan wipes sweat from his brow and stares down at the infant. Who gravely
asks his question.
Da,
he says. Da?
Delfan leans the rifle against the rail of the
lift-platform and he strides to the rapture tree and grasps a large and
well-used spade. The infant watching with wide eyes as his father comes to stand
before him. He looms over the boy, blocking the sun, edged by its radiance, a
primitive intent on slaughter. His shadow stretching across the earth and up
the side of the hull and the shovel hanging like a guillotine
I
name thee Hob, he says.
Da,
says the infant. Da?
Delfan
brings the spade down, impales it in the sand. It stands there, humming.
Da,
says the child, the son. Da?
Dig,
roars Jack Delfan. Dig … be my creed.
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