Jonathan Strahan - Eclipse Three

No more ocarina music, and the woman had vanished.

Tug became more aware of his surroundings, as if awaking from a dream.

He stood on the edge of an artificial embankment. He suddenly realized the nature of the spot.

The Attawandaron Canal had been connected to the Cunhestiyuh River at intervals by short feeder canals, to refresh its flow. This was one such. A leaky yet still mostly functioning feedgate on the riverside was still in place, barring ingress of the river and making for a low water level in the feeder chute. Entering the Canal on the opposite side from the towpath, this feeder inlet, perhaps overgrown on its far end too, had been totally overlooked by Tug in his quest.

Tug looked down.

Nearly filling the narrow channel, the Tom Pudding floated below, lit up like an Oktoberfest beer garden with colored fairy lights, its deck busy with people. A ladder ran from the top of the feeder canal on down to the barge's broad roof.

A fair-haired man looked up then and spotted Tug. The man said, "Pellenera's brought us another one. Hey, pal, c'mon down!"

The one and only performance of the educational saturnalia was scheduled for this very night, at the Carrollboro venue that generally hosted visiting chautauquas, the Keith Vawter Memorial Auditorium. Franchot Galliard had paid for the rental of the space, reluctantly tapping into his deep family fortunes, despite an inherent miserliness that had caused him, about four years previously, to purchase the Tom Pudding at scrapyard prices and take up residence aboard, whilst leasing out his Ellwanger Barry-district mansion at exorbitant rates to rich shorebirds.

Oswaldo Vasterling was just that persuasive.

The young visionary self-appointed captain of the permanently moored barge full of oddballs could have herded cats into a swimming pool, Tug believed. Short and roly-poly, his complexion a diluted Mediterranean olive hue, the stone-faced twenty-one-year-old struck most first-time interlocutors as unprepossessing in the extreme. (Tug suspected a bit of Asperger's, affected or otherwise, in Vasterling's character.)

Gorm Vasterling, Oswaldo's dad, had been an unmarried Dikelander resident in Fourierist Russia, an agriculture specialist. When the Omniarch of the Kiev Phalanx ordered Gorm to transplant his talents to Cuba, to aid the Fourierist brethren there, Gorm instantly obeyed.

Upon relocation to Cuba, Gorm's Dikelander genes almost immediately combined with the Latina genes of Ximena Alcaron, a Fourier Passionologist specializing in Animic Rehabilitation. The result was a stubby, incipiently mustachio'd child who had received the least appealing somatic traits of each parent.

But in brainpower, little Oswaldo was not scanted.

Some three years ago, in 2007, at age eighteen, educationally accelerated Oswaldo was already doing post-doc work in M-theory with Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a semi-independent think-tank headquartered on the campus of Carrollboro U. But Smolin and his star student had clashed violently over some abstruse quantum heresy, and Oswaldo Vasterling had been cast out from the sanctum

He hadn't gone far, though, ending up just a mile or so away from the campus, serendipitously stumbling upon Franchot Galliard's welcoming barge. There, he commandeered several rooms as his lab-cum-sleeping quarters and set up a rococo experimental apparatus resembling the mutant offspring of a Portajohn and a digital harmonium, attached to a small-scale radio-telescope, a gravity-wave interferometer and a bank of networked ordinateurs, the whole intended to replicate what he had left behind at the PITP.

Forever short of money for his unperfected equipment, he perpetually harassed the stingy Galliard for dough, generally with little success, and inveigled everyone else onboard to participate in money-raising schemes, of which the chautauqua was the latest. (The city had been plastered with advertisements, both wheat-pasted and CERN-spaced, and if Oswaldo's show filled half of Vawter's seats with paying customers, he'd net a hefty sum-especially since all the performers were volunteers.)

But the mixed-media performance also stood as Oswaldo's intended refutation of his ex-comrades at the PITP. He had invited them all to witness his theories rendered in music and dance, light and sound, hoping they would repent and acknowledge the Vasterling genius. And his quondam colleagues had accepted en masse, in the spirit of those anticipating a good intellectual brawl.

Tug's part in this affair? He had been placed in charge of stage lighting, on the crack-brained logic that he had worked before with machines that projected light. Luckily, the boards at the Vawter were old-fashioned, non-o consoles, and Tug had mastered them easily in a few rehearsals, leaving him confident he could do his part to bring off "Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes" successfully.

So in the hours remaining before showtime, Tug had little to do save hang out with Sukey Damariscotta. He looked for her now.

The vast open cargo interior of the old decommissioned barge had been transformed over the past four years into a jerry-built, multi-level warren of sleeping, dining, working and recreational spaces by the resident amateur carpenters (and by one former professional, the surly alcoholic Don Rippey, who managed just barely to ensure that every load-bearing structure met minimal standards for non-collapse, that the stolen electricity was not fed directly into, say, the entire hull, and that the equally purloined plumbing did not mix inflow with outflow). Consequently, there were no straight paths among the quarters, and finding anyone involved something just short of solving the Traveling Voyageur problem.

If the layout of the Tom Pudding remained still obscure to Tug even after a month's habitation, he felt he finally had a pretty good fix on most of the recomplicated interpersonal topography of the barge. But initially, that feature too had presented an opaque façade.

Hailed from the barge that night of discovery, Tug had descended the ladder into a clamorous reception from a few dozen curious strangers. Supplied, sans questioning, with a meal, several stiff drinks and a bunk, he had fallen straight asleep.

In the morning, Tug stumbled upon the same fellow who had first spotted him. Brewing coffee, the ruggedly handsome guy introduced himself as Harmon Frawley. Younger than Tug by a decade or more, boyish beyond his years, Frawley had been an ad copywriter in Toronto until a painful divorce, after which he had gone footloose and impoverishedly free. He still favored his old wardrobe of Brooks Brothers shirts and trousers, but they were getting mighty beat.

Sipping coffee and running a big hand through his blond bangs, Harmon explained the origin, ethos and crew of the Tom Pudding to Tug.

"So Galliard owns this floating commune, but Vasterling is the boss?"

"Right. Insofar as anyone is. Call Ozzie the 'Prime Mover' if you need a more accurate title. Frankie just wants to be left alone with his collection."

When Tug eventually met Franchot Galliard, he was instantly reminded of Adolphe Menjou in his starring role in Where the Blue Begins, lugubrious canine makeup and all. Galliard's penchant for antique eight-millimeter stag films, especially those starring the young Nancy Davis, struck Tug as somewhat unhealthy, and he was glad the rich collector knew how to operate his own projector. Still, who was he to criticize any man's passion?

"And he doesn't care who crashes here?"

"Not at all! So long as it doesn't cost him anything. But you know, not many people find us here. And even the ones who do don't always stay. The hardcores are special. Particularly since Pellenera showed up."