Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

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 harrassed 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 Travelling 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 clamourous 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 favoured 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-millimetre 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.”

Mention of the enigmatic Nubian Pied Piper sent mystical frissons down Tug’s spine. The story of her origin lacked no complementary mystery or romance.

“It was a dark and stormy night. Really. About six months ago, sometime in May. Ozzie announced that he was gonna power up his brane-buster for the first time. Bunch of us gathered down in his lab around midnight. Boat was rocking like JFK trying to solve the Cuban Seafloor Colony Crisis. So Ozzie straps himself in and starts playing the keys of that electronic harmonium thingy that’s at the core of the device. Weirdest music you’ve ever heard. Flashing lights, burning smells, the sound of about a dozen popping components self-destructing simultaneously— Then the inside of the booth part of the gizmo goes all smoky-hazy-like, and out pops this naked African chick! She looks around for a few seconds, not scared, just amazed, says a few words no one understands, then runs off into the night!”

Tug’s erotic imagination supplied all too vividly the image of the naked ebony charms of Pellenera—conjured up a picture so distracting that he missed the next few words from Harmon Frawley.

“—Janey Vogelsang. She was the first one Pellenera led back here, a week later. Marcello named her that, by the way. Just means ‘black hide.’ And you’re, oh, about the tenth.”

“And she never speaks?”

“Not since that first night. She just plays that demon ocarina. You ever heard the like?”

“Never.”

Harmon scratched his manly chin. “Why she’s leading people here, how she chooses ’em—that’s anybody’s guess.”

“Does she live onboard?”

“Nope. Roams the city, so far as anyone can tell.”

And so Tug entered the society of the Tom Pudding as one cryptically anointed.

He came now to a darkened TV room, whose walls, floor and ceiling had been carpeted with heterogeneous scavenged remnants. An old console set dominated a couch on which were crowded Iona Draggerman, Jura Burris and Turk Vanson.

“Hey, Tug, join us! We’re watching Vajayjay and Badonkadonk !”

“It’s that episode where Vajayjay’s relatives visit from India and have to go on a possum hunt!”

The antics of Kaz’s animated Hindi cat and Appalachian mule, while generally amusing, held no immediate allure for Tug.

“Aren’t you guys playing the part of quarks tonight? Shouldn’t you be getting your costumes ready?”

“We’ve got hours yet!”

“We don’t dance every time Ozzie pulls our strings!”

Tug moved on, past various uncanny or domestic tableaux, including the always spooky incense-fueled devotional practice of Tatang, the mono-named shorebird from the sunken Kiribati Islands.

At last he found Sukey Damariscotta, sitting all bundled up and cross-legged in a director’s chair on deck, sketching trees upon the shoreline.

Only twenty-four, Sukey possessed a preternatural confidence derived from her autodidactic artistic prowess. Tug had never met anyone so capable of both meticulous fine art and fluent cartooning.

Sukey’s heritage included more Amerind blood than most other Americans possessed. In her, the old diffuse and diluted aboriginal strains absorbed by generations of colonists had recombined to birth a classic pre-Columbian beauty, all cheekbones, bronze skin and coal-black hair, styled somewhat incongruously in a Dead Rabbits tough-girl cut repopularized recently by pennywhistlers the Pogues.