The Dream Miners

by Danielle L. Parker

page 2 of 3

Part 2

There is time for a man, that weakly pulsating envelope of soul and blood protected from the void and its infinite infernoes of light by mere plates and rivets of metal. There is time for that man to fear, and to remember...

He is an Ancient Mariner, and he seizes one of three. “Sit,” he says to that man. “I pass, like night, from world to world. I have a tale for you.” And such is the glitter of his blind white eye, burned to ash in the furnace of his soul, there is no gainsaying him.

The man, who does not know yet he is captive, laughs, and signals for another round of whiskey. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” he promises his two companions, and, “One more for the Old One!” he calls, easy still in his heart. For there seems nothing to fear in that gaunt, aged frame, or the skeletal visage scorched and dried by the radiation of stars, or even in the claw-like strength that holds his own muscular arm against the table as if it were a child’s.

“A tale,” the Old One says. “Listen to me... I steered my ship past the last rock and the last sun of the Rim. You know that place, too, wanderer! I see the void in your fierce blue eyes. There you know is a ribbon of nothing; stars lie prisoners in its sooty absolute—”

“The anti-matter drifts,” the captive inserts, tolerant and disbelieving, as he toys with his half-empty glass and looks toward the door. “You expect me to believe you passed through the Dark Inversion, you old loon? A single atom of anti-matter would—”

“Listen to me,” the Old One commands. “Seven days and seven nights I steered my ship through its deadly shoals; death whizzed by me like a wind and inquired at my doors. Stars I passed, and I saw the winds of nothing eating their spinning innards. The absolute consumed my steely fins; the needle of my prow vanished before my eyes; nothingness encroached upon my soul. Listen!”

“Very poetic, but it doesn’t scan,” the man says with a sneer, and begins to rise. But the skinny hand upon his wrist chains him like a manacle, and the man shrugs and hesitates, with a frown now drawing his pale brows.

“You are strong, young man; you are unafraid,” the Old One says. “Listen to me! So there passed a sleepless time. Yet at last I saw a star, a speck, a light of shining white...and there I stole my Albatross, this curse around my neck. Take up my dream, my Albatross, for which I sold my soul!”

And then upon the Old One’s scored palm the man sees a small glowing dream. And there is nothing the man ever imagined or conceived in his life more beautiful or desirable than that dream. For in it is every allure of treasure and power: uneasy crowns and purchased princesses; ships gravid with blood-freighted gold; there a loveless dwarf capering on the riverbank with his stolen treasure, and there, too, the sullen pirate king, burying an amber bottle of rum in the chill embrace of his murdered shipmates.

Captain Blunt whistled softly as he pulled his mind back to the present. “We’re both mad, Old One!” he admonished. His hands moved upon his boards; Pig’s Eye rolled and poised to dive with the premonitory shudder of a foundering ship. Far beyond wavered a thin ribbon of impenetrable, absolute nothingness...

Captain Blunt touched a final switch, still humming his aimless tune. “When Anti met Matter, they both went a-splatter...”

Part 3

Inside a skin of steel, a hollow-cheeked man lounged in front of his red-lit and screaming boards. His mouth was taut with hours of unrelieved wakefulness; wiry gold hairs dusted his unshaven jaw. The singlet strained across his hard chest was streaked beneath the armpits; an unlit smoking-tube dangled from his lips. The litter of half-a-dozen hastily consumed and already forgotten meals surrounded his outstretched boots. The man held a match in his fingers, but that, too, was now forgotten.

For there in the infinity of space was a sight Captain Blunt had never seen before. A giant red orb burned like the mouth of hell. But a great gout of fiery matter gushed forth from the heart of the star like a hemorrhaging wound; something unseen and dark sucked its dying innards like an avid leech. Where the dark and the light collided, a rainbow coruscation of mutual annihilation blazed with more potency than a million nuclear explosions.

Pig’s Eye rocked violently; a white-hot flare briefly overcame the overstretched optical shielding. Blunt squinted at his board with watering, half-blinded eyes. “There goes the other thruster,” he remarked over the shrill, toneless warning of his computer and flicked his match to life with his thumb. As he cupped the minute flare to his mouth with one hand, he leaned forward and touched the red button before him with the other.

With a shudder, Pig’s Eye made its last leap. The man waited wakeful, listening to the soundless howl of the void, for hours he no longer counted.

But at last came the moment when his bleary eyes saw it. A pure white star blazed like Circe in an alluring shroud; attendant planets whirled around her like leaping ticks. One world glowed green as poisonous absinthe beneath an equatorial belting of white mist. Around that world flickered yet a tinier dot, an insignificant speck with a badly pockmarked and dented hull.

Blunt rose stiffly to his feet and scratched his newly luxuriant beard.

“Well, Jim boy,” he murmured. “Time to pass on Thomas Finnegan’s last respects. First we’d better have a long shower and a shave.”

Part 4

Finnegan’s Bucket might as well have been the Marie Celeste. Managing the mating of his tiny shuttle to Finnegan’s old-fashioned access port with difficulty, Blunt prowled the eerily half-lit and empty corridors with a sizable gun in his fist. But he found no occupant. The ship’s lone shuttle was gone. Examining the board, he saw no sign the Denobian had returned once in those dozen elapsed days. Nor did Bucket’s computer record any communication from its missing shuttle and self-promoted captain.

Radiation levels were dangerous inside the damaged ship. Nevertheless, Blunt lingered long enough to accomplish certain sabotages before he returned, hollow-eyed and staggering with fatigue, to his own ship. Silencing Pig’s Eye’s clamorous and complaining computer with a ruthless stab of his finger, he cast a wearied eye at the daunting list of repairs his board urged upon him, programmed several alerts, and went below.

But the oblivion he so desperately required was strangely elusive. He tossed restlessly upon his bed. His head thrashed upon the pillow; his huge fists clenched and unclenched at his sides.

Surely this was nightmare. But it seemed to Blunt two giants bent over him even as he sought to evade them in his troubled sleep. He saw a skeleton Death, rattling a single die in a cage of five bony digits. The die fell, spinning in the air with the slow beauty of a time delay, until it struck some unseen surface and rested there, quiescent. Blunt began to count the dots. Three... four... five...

Then another hand with long red nails reached for the die, and the second giant bent over him. Her face was as large as a moon. Her eyes were holes into the abyss.

The die fell. The little cube seemed to float forever, until it once more struck the invisible surface and bounced, just a little, before it rested. Six black dots...

The sleeping man groaned an incoherent plea. But he knew Death could not help him now. She-Death-in-Life had won him.

Part 5

Thoth had wasted no time getting down to the surface. Captain Blunt determined to proceed with far more caution. He spent the next three ship-days repairing his damaged vessel, making repeated trips to Finnegan’s hijacked vessel to scavenge material.

He was forced to make several perilous and harrowing space-walks to replace the damaged shielding. Attached to his ship by a thin umbilical cord, Blunt looked down on the green and misty world beneath his boots. If the whispers of a thousand spaceports were true, there hid the fabulous mother lode of the dreamstones. Tomorrow he would stand upon its lush surface and perhaps hold the ransom of kings, one glowing stone, in his own work-roughened palm.

But Thoth’s continued silence hinted at unknown dangers. Blunt cast a jaundiced eye upon the serene beauty beneath him, humming his bitter tune, as he welded his last plate to the hull.

Oh, the humming of the bees in the cottonwood trees, by the soda-water fountain, and the lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings, in the Big Rock Candy Mountain...

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