The Dream Miners

by Danielle L. Parker

conclusion

Part 6

Into the mists of an Edenic morning, Blunt dove. Streamers of cool steam rose from the strangely Earth-like trees and grasses spread like a green quilt beneath him. A brightly colored bird with long tail feathers of blue, green, and purple floated like a zephyr on its widespread wings. No intelligent hand had, perhaps, guided the planting of the riotous flowers whose scents greeted Blunt as he grounded and opened his small hatch. But never had Blunt seen or scented a paradise as lovely. Already, the wavering tendrils of a delicate, blue-flowered vine attempted to colonize the alien incongruity of his shuttle’s metal ramp.

Blunt surveyed the scene, his hand on his gun belt. Thoth’s shuttle stood on gently sunken fins, decorated like a lei-bedecked Hawaiian tourist by pioneering flowers. Nearby was a metal shack enclosing an antiquated winching engine and an open hole. A rust-speckled metal fuel tank stood by. A mound of rubble, indicating both ancient and more recent mining operations, further scarred the otherwise breathtaking vista.

Blunt kicked the vine away with his boot as he walked down the ramp. “Got to be a snake here somewhere.”

But he found no answers in Thoth’s shuttle. The little ship was locked, of course, an obstacle Blunt overcame by the simple expedient of burning a man-sized hole in the hatch with his gun. The shuttle was now no longer spaceworthy, but Blunt, waiting for the red-hot metal to cool, was not perturbed. One way or another, this was the last corral for Finnegan’s murderous First Mate. Some debts Blunt counted sacred. The grinning ape was as good as flower fertilizer, if, indeed, he were not already pushing daisies out of his hairy chest.

That last was an intriguing question. Blunt, squeezing past the still-steaming slag of the warped door, examined the shuttle’s computer logs with a growing frown. Thoth had landed fifteen days earlier and followed normal procedures to secure his shuttle. He had not been back since.

What had happened to the missing First Mate, a muscular King Kong who, like all of his simian species, stood at least seven Earthly feet of ropy strength? Where was the horde of dreamstones that Thoth, surely, planned to leave with?

Blunt emerged soberly and, once more in the bright sunlight, pressed a fresh clip into Old Eliminator before he rehung the gun upon his hip.

One did not need to be Sherlock to figure out where Thoth had vanished. The Denobian’s Sasquatch-sized bare feet had made deep indentations in the soft soil. They led straight to the mining shaft.

Blunt, for his part, was in no hurry to follow. First he examined the chain that tethered the mining cage. The chain’s solid, recently oiled iron links appeared sturdy enough. The winching engine was a gasoline-fired internal-combustion oddity, but it, too, had been recently serviced, no doubt by Thoth. The contraption roared to healthy life when Blunt cranked its leathery cord.

The next step was to raise the cage (still below, another indication Thoth had never returned from the mine). This was accomplished without signs of trouble. Blunt, leaning over the hole with his gun in his hand, watched the empty cage emerge from the darkness. The contraption bobbled to the end of its iron chain with a theatrical clanking. Blunt shut off the engine and turned to the fuel tank. He had to be sure.

Blunt next tested the controls that operated the car, which allowed a man to return from the bottom of the shaft. He examined the panel inside the cage. The mechanism was crude but adequate; twisted wires on their own tiny spindle conveyed the occupant’s commands to the larger winching engine above. They, too, appeared to work without flaw.

His remaining tests proved equally satisfactory. Whatever had delayed Thoth, it did not seem to be a malfunction in the winching equipment. Blunt rewound the cage to the surface one last time and returned to his shuttle.

A half-hour’s work, sitting on the ramp in the pleasant sunshine, yielded a battery-powered, radio backup he hoped could call down the car. Blunt had no intention of being marooned below. The shaft’s dirt sides were too soft to be climbed.

He kept a wary eye as he worked. But the feathered birds tinkled like the chimes of a gamelan orchestra, and the wind played through the fernlike trees. A herd of knee-high, barrel-bodied ruminants like capybaras grazed across the sweet grasses without once lifting their heads in more than mild astonishment at his presence. Perhaps there was a snake hidden in this paradise, but the tame animals did not expect a tiger, at least.

He clipped the last of his expeditionary tools to his belt and stood. It was time to hunt chimp. Then (and Blunt felt a feral grin stretch his lips across his teeth as he strode toward the mining cage), then, yes, then he would fill his own rough palms with the silken fire of the magic pebbles, and there was nothing, nothing that could be bought or bartered or gifted, denied to the man who could trade the mesmerizing flame of the dreamstone. Rich men would spill their wealth into his hands, and ivory-skinned women willingly spread their limbs in return for the whispering allure of the magic pebble.

The wind sighed gustily, like the breath of a woman in the throes of the passion he had just idly imagined. The little breeze stirred the loose rubble at his feet. Blunt, on the point of entering the cage, heard the small avalanche. His eye followed the slight sound without thought. Something gleamed there now, something dull but metallic, that did not belong in the newly slipped earth.

Blunt hesitated. A stride took him closer; he bent, and his fingers plucked up the mysterious object.

He held a small disc with a hole perforating its once-shining surface. The cord that had at one time threaded it had rotted to slivers. Blunt, turning the ovoid to the sun, made out the hint of letters beneath a crusting of earth. Blunt brushed away the dirt and squinted at the engraving.

The Blue Kentucky! A crewman of an Earth ship missing for more than forty years had once worn the dogtag he held. Blunt’s fingers clenched on the disc.

He dug through the rubble for almost an hour. But if there were bones of those lost spacemen, they had long ago rotted. Blunt found nothing, except that one small item no spacer yielded up until death.

Somewhere in the sigh of the soft wind, he seemed to hear a woman’s laugh. Her whisper rose out of the earth beneath his boots, and her voice was the basso deep of a giantess. Death-in-Life! Why had he not understood? What a fool he was!

Blunt straightened his weary back and brushed the dirt from his hands. “I’ve still got a debt to take care of,” he said aloud, and touched the gun at his belt. “I’m not leaving until it’s paid!” He put the dogtag in his pocket and returned to the cage.

The contraption, swinging slightly under Blunt’s crouching form, descended into the abyss. The dank mustiness of the deep pervaded his lungs. He heard the slow drip of unseen water and the moan of wind rushing up the shaft.

He fingered the beam-light hung on his belt, but there was, perhaps, no need for its aid, for below the descending plate was already a faint, spectral gleam. It was the light of the dreamstones, and as the cage sank, the light grew brighter and brighter.

In their matrix of shining white quartz, the pebbles gleamed, thousands of jewel-bright eyes embedded in a glassy sea. Fingers of corrosive allure scored his brain.

Take me, whispered a woman whose pale hair was the only cover for her slender body; the tips of her breasts teased him from its silken cover, and her eyes, half-hidden by those white-blond strands, glowed.

I wish you’d never left me, Jim, oh come back forever, whispered another, and this girl was small and sweetly plump, and her hair black and curly as a caracal lamb’s.

I’m proud of you, son, boomed another voice, and a man in an old-fashioned business suit, his seamed face grinning beneath his thatch of graying fair hair, shook the hand of a Jim Blunt strangely taller, younger, and handsomer than the captain knew himself to be.

I didn’t do it, said another Jim Blunt, I didn’t shoot him, and this time, the man who had not smiled before smiled gently now and extended his blue-sleeved hand. The silver star on his shirt front glittered. Yes, we know. It was an accident, of course. You won’t be charged, son.

And then, at last, Jim Blunt saw the face that had been bloody and eyeless, what was left of it, and now it was the face of his brother. That face was whole again and young and full of the love it had never shown in life.

So the man crouched in the cage wept and howled and covered his eyes with his hands. But he could not keep out that light.

Believe, whispered a voice as deep as the bones of the mountains. Only believe, and it will be true.

James Blunt grasped the edge of his cage with a white-knuckled fist. He bit a finger savagely, and tasted iron and salt. He flung up his head, and with the red trickle of his own blood trailing from his lips, glared into the kaleidoscope of light like a tiger turning to face the hounds.

“Shove it,” he growled, and lurched to his feet as the cage bobbed to a halt. “I’ve got a job to do. Where’s that damned chimp?”

Somewhere in the fractured light, something moved. The something that moved giggled. The raspy giggle trailed off, after a few minutes, then began again. The sound raised the hairs on the back of Jim Blunt’s neck.

“Sly?” the voice mumbled, when it stopped giggling. “Is that you? What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you. Look what I’ve found!”

The large dark shape Jim Blunt was just beginning to make out hitched up and arranged itself in a reclining position. Blunt saw Thoth.

The Denobian lay upon a bed of dreamstones. The gleaming pebbles filled his long arms and overflowed his lap. As he shifted, the stones purred softly. Thoth gathered the glowing gems in his arms and carried them to his nostrils, inhaling them like a bouquet of flowers, and squeezed them in his fingers, as reverently as a man squeezes a breast.

“I’m rich,” the Denobian crowed in a scraped-raw voice Blunt could scarcely understand. “Look at how rich I am!”

The blood receded from Jim Blunt’s face. “Yes,” he whispered. “Look at you!”

There was no flesh upon the once mighty form of the giant. The Denobian’s hairy skin hung on his bones like the pleats of an accordion. His lips were swollen and blackened. The eyes in his simian skull face were dried and blind. From where he stood, the captain could smell the foul reek, for the great creature had lain oblivious in his own waste for fifteen long days with the opalescent glow of the stones to comfort him. And even as Blunt watched, a worm poked a misshapen white head out of the ape’s swollen ear.

“We’ve been friends, Sly,” the dry voice croaked. “We’ve been friends for six long years now. I’m glad you came. We’ll see good times together again, won’t we? Look how rich we are! Doesn’t it feel wonderful to be so rich, old friend?”

Jim Blunt drew his gun. “Maybe I’m a merciful fool,” he said, “or maybe you just shouldn’t die happy, after what you did to Sly... but this is the end, you great bloody ape!”

And he blew him to pieces and left the dreamstones crying behind in the fire and steaming meat as he rose to the surface and the fair sun above.

Part 7

The pub was quiet and dim. On Sunday, here in this more civilized realm of humanity, even spacers were required to keep a more respectful mien. Jim Blunt found the bartender alone behind his counter, wiping the wooden surface with a cloth.

“What’ll you have?”

“Bourbon. Straight.”

The drink was delivered and paid for, and the bartender, a small man with a few wisps of hair combed carefully over his round bald pate, lingered near his sole customer as he wiped the countertop. Perhaps he was lonely.

“Been here before?”

“Long time ago.”

The bartender nodded. In the background, a sportscast turned down low mumbled cheers as a goal was made.

At last the captain set down his empty glass.

“Another?”

“No.”

But the captain drew two more chips and held them between his fingers with the edges showing. The bartender nodded in understanding, and waited.

“There used to be a crazy old loon here,” the captain said. “He liked to talk about the Dream Mines. Claimed to have been through the Dark Inversion and found them. Remember him?”

The bartender laughed. “He was nuttier than a cashew. Yeah, I remember him! He moved on. Haven’t seen him for months now.”

“Don’t happen to know his name?”

The bartender hesitated and looked at the chips wistfully.

“Called himself Randle, I think. Yes, it was Randle. That’s all I know. Don’t take him serious about those dreamstones, though. He was just a crazy old coot!” And the bartender grinned widely and showed the pink plastic edge of his false teeth below his lips.

The captain laid the two chips down on the table. “That’s all I want to know,” he said. “Thanks.”

The bartender scooped up the coins. He wandered to the far end of his counter, still wiping, humming an aimless, wistful tune under his breath.

Jim Blunt took a small sheet out of his vest. He unfolded it. One line in the brief list he scrutinized caught his attention, and he put his finger on it. Joe Randle, late of Louisville, Kentucky, was indeed listed as the chief engineer of the lost Blue Kentucky. Blunt scrunched up his paper.

Somewhere upon a lovely green world circling a far, fair star, Joe Randle’s murdered crewmates and captain rested with flowers decorating their unmarked graves. And in another nameless spaceport, an Ancient Mariner who could never, ever rest pressed his story upon another stranger, carrying his curse in his hand, his shining white Albatross, the beautiful dream he had sold his soul for.

On the step outside, in the early evening, the captain turned up the collar of his vest. A soft, cool rain had begun. He looked up at the damp sky.

Somewhere up there, his stubborn, patched vessel was one of those myriad sparks in the lilac sky. His star called him, and that was as it should be. After all, a man had a more or less honest living to make.

to Challenge 379...