Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

BY the sixth day of the voyage, Ruiz Aw had become friendly with the second mate of the Loracca, the ancient barge that had carried him away from his enemies in SeaStack. Gunderd was a short wiry man with bad teeth. He complained frequently and imaginatively about the decrepitude of the Loracca, the incompetence of her crew, the lucklessness of her captain: “Four ships sunk under him already. He’s a young man yet. Makes me constantly uneasy.”

Gunderd affected a costume of gaudy rags and a clanking assortment of gold chains. When Ruiz asked him if he feared falling overboard with so much ballast around his neck, Gunderd replied cheerfully that he couldn’t swim anyway. “Best to get it over with quick,” he explained. “It’s not the dying I fear, so much… it’s the long slow falling away from the light. Into the cold dark.”

“I see,” said Ruiz Aw politely, though he found Gunderd’s attitude eccentric.

Gunderd gave him a green grin. “Not everyone is such a philosopher, I admit. You yourself I perceive to be an optimistic flounderer. Am I right?”

Ruiz nodded, amused. They stood together at the rail of the topmost deck of the Loracca, just abaft the wheel-house. They looked out over a blue-black sea, glassy calm. The sky was the color of tarnished brass, clear but for a line of dark clouds to the north. The closest land was far below the southern horizon; the captain had plotted his course to take them well outside a bank of off-lying reefs.

Inside the wheelhouse, the captain hunched over his navigation module and loudly cursed the fate that had laden his vessel with almost two thousand dedicants of the Immolator Mystery, for delivery to the cannibal Blades of Namp. Gunderd apparently regarded the captain as a figure of fun; he winked and flapped his lips in silent mockery of the captain’s invective.

A click and whine announced the production of a weather chart from one of the Loracca ’s predictive synthesizers — and abruptly the captain fell silent.

The Immolators swarmed the broad deck below, reading from sacred tracts, singing discordant songs, beating each other with small ceremonial flails — all of them frantic with suicidal religious mania. Gunderd watched them and made his tiny black eyes wide with melodramatic astonishment. “Though you claim optimism, still you wear the robe of Immolation — surely a more serious impediment to survival than my chains, not so?”

Ruiz smiled, but made no response. Gunderd liked to tease him about his disguise, but his speculations as to Ruiz’s real identity and purposes seemed unmalicious.

From long careful habit, Ruiz refused to gratify Gunderd’s curiosity.

Ruiz had become acquainted with the second mate at a nightly kanterip game that met in whatever nook of the vessel the captain seemed unlikely to inspect that evening. He and Gunderd were the only players who won consistently — though Gunderd won a good deal more than Ruiz, who cheated just enough to stay a little ahead. One night, a drunken stoker had taken offense at Gunderd’s more blatant manipulation of the cards and had attempted to gut the second mate with a cargo hook. Ruiz had tapped the stoker’s skull with a handy piece of dunnage.

Thereafter Gunderd took Ruiz under his wing, finding slightly better accommodations for Ruiz and his group of refugees, providing them an extra water ration, and occasionally bringing them food from the crew’s mess — food which, though just as plain as the passengers’ diet, was pleasantly free of insect life.

Gunderd accepted Ruiz’s taciturnity without visible resentment. “Ah… you’re full of secrets. I look at you and rejoice in my own simplicity.” Again his little black eyes glittered.

Ruiz clapped him on the shoulder. “Everyone has secrets — even you, paragon of simplicity though you may be.” He turned away and went to the ladder.

Gunderd laughed. “Perhaps, perhaps. So, do you return to your odd crew? I must say, they seem even less like Immolators than you do… though the woman has a certain darkness about her. A beauty, no doubt about that, but fey. You should be cautious.”

The cheer seemed to go out of the bright day. “As you say,” said Ruiz, and went below.

He made his way through the thronging Immolators, shaking off those who attempted to drag him into their rituals. Most of them accepted his refusal without annoyance, except for one large red-faced man with a nail-studded flail, whose frothing devotion forced Ruiz to dodge away nimbly.

Eventually he reached his quarters, which consisted of a livestock stall on the second deck. An organic reek attested to the identity of former passengers, but the walls of the stall gave some privacy, and a usually reliable breeze blew through the crevices.

Inside, his fellow refugees waited. Molnekh sat atop their baggage in a vigilant pose, holding a steel club ready. The cadaverously thin conjuror had adapted to the rigors of voyaging better than the other Pharaohans; he looked no closer to death than he usually did.

Molnekh laid down the club, which he had acquired from an unwary Immolator. “What news, Ruiz Aw?” he asked brightly.

“Yes, what news?” rumbled Dolmaero, the stout Pharaohan Guildmaster. His broad face was pale and sweaty; he still suffered from seasickness and had lost weight since their departure from SeaStack. “Do we approach our destination? I almost think the cannibals would be better than this terrible instability.” He rose with some difficulty and rubbed at his back.

“Not yet,” said Ruiz. “Don’t be so anxious to meet the cannibals.” He worried about Dolmaero, whose health seemed precarious. Over the weeks they had spent together since their escape from Corean the slaver, he had grown quite fond of the Guildmaster.

The third Pharaohan sat in a dark corner and said nothing. Ruiz smiled at Nisa tentatively, but her expression was distant.

Ruiz turned away. The change in Nisa tormented him. Not long before, they had been lovers, and she had given him the sweetest moments in his long life. Now they seemed to be two unhappy strangers, thrown together by ruinous mischance.

In SeaStack, Nisa and the others had been recaptured by Corean. Ruiz had been unable to prevent this, but Nisa apparently believed that he was in some way responsible for what had happened to her. Since he had rescued the Pharaohans from a slaver’s dungeon, Nisa had asked him nothing about the events in SeaStack, and he had been afraid to attempt an explanation, for fear she would refuse to listen. Since they had embarked on the Loracca, she spoke only when necessary. She left her corner only rarely and her beauty had grown even more haggard. It cut at his heart to see her so, which was the reason he wandered the barge, looking for card games and other distractions.

Ruiz lay down on a straw pallet in the corner farthest from Nisa’s and used a packsack for his pillow. The spicy resinous scent of its contents overcame the barnyard smell of the stall, for which Ruiz was grateful. Before departing SeaStack, Ruiz had arranged a two-level disguise. On the surface, they were four Immolators, driven by religious lunacy to donate their temporal bodies to the Blades of Namp. However, when they arrived on the burning beaches of Namp, Ruiz was prepared to assume a new identity, that of courier from one of the pirate Lords of SeaStack, who sold the Blades their sacramental drug.

Since the rites of the Blades involved getting high and roasting people on spits, Ruiz wasn’t entirely eager to arrive at their destination. Still, that arrival would get them that much closer to the moment when they could leave this brutal world, forever.