The Chronicles of Lucifer Jones: Volume I by Mike Resnick

Author:Mike Resnick [Resnick, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Microsoft
Published: 2012-02-29T05:00:00+00:00

7. MUTINY

The Dying Quail didn’t have much in the way of a passenger list, but on the other hand The Dying Quail wasn’t all that much of a ship, so things kind of worked out even. I had heard that shipboard romances could be really memorable occurrences, but the only person who I could find on deck at night was a wrinkled old dermatologist from Korea who spent the better part of a week trying to convince me that contrary to popular belief the earth was really flat, or at the very least built along the lines of a gently pitched roof.

The food was okay if you liked tuna. It was absolutely terrible if you didn’t. I didn’t, and by the third or fourth day out of port, I don’t think anybody else did either.

There was an elderly English couple who had just bought a cattle farm in the Transvaal area and spent most of their time fighting about whether to butcher them all on the spot or maybe get a little milk from them first. There was a scrawny blond Swede who never left his cabin except to eat tuna and then get rid of it over the side of the boat. There was a trio of German girls, round and firm and much too fully packed, who didn’t speak a word of any civilized tongue and spent all their time taking pictures, not that the water off the Ivory Coast looked all that different from the water next to Liberia. There were a couple of East Indian men who would strip off all their clothes every morning, sit in the blazing sun all day with their legs crossed kind of painful-like, tell everybody not to eat hamburgers, and then go back to their rooms as soon as it was dark. We had a down-on-his-luck actor from Canada who kept reciting the more obscure soliloquies from Troilus and Cressida, and a writer from Paraguay who drank in most of his local color from a bottle of Scotch. And, finally, we had a stunningly beautiful belly dancer from Greece who apologized for distracting us but explained that she had to sunbathe in the nude because her audiences didn’t like to see different shadings where various straps had been. Watching her body get an even tan was about as quick-moving a spectator sport as watching paint dry, but it did hold certain advantages over paint-watching when viewed in all of its many aspects, and it provided me with just about my only form of diversion during the first week of the voyage.

The captain and the crew were nominally British, but I don’t think more than half of them had ever gotten to within five hundred miles of London or Liverpool. The rest were swarthy, unwashed seamen who swore in Slavic tongues and spent a lot of time glaring sullenly at the passengers, who either ignored them or lectured them on the evils of eating beef. The captain himself was a jovial,

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