by Martha Wells
It was her turn to freeze. After a moment, she stood up and said, “It’s a vessel.”
Dr Marlende let his breath out in a sharp sigh, as if he had been holding it. “I concur.”
Daniel’s expression was somewhere between horrified and incredulous. “What kind of vessel? An airship?”
“Something like,” Dr Marlende said. “The shape is similar.”
“A vessel?” Lord Engal burst out. “But how? Even if such a craft launched into the aetheric stream from the other side of the world, we would have seen it making its way up–”
No, Emilie thought, her heart pounding, that’s not what he means.
“That’s not what they mean,” Miss Marlende interrupted. “It’s a vessel, but it came from the other end of the aetheric stream.”
“The other end,” Lord Engal repeated. “But that’s… not impossible, I suppose.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Miss Marlende said.
Emilie couldn’t contain herself. “So it’s people from another aetheric plane, coming to discover us, like Dr Marlende discovered the Hollow World?”
“Yes,” Dr Marlende said. “They could be very much like us. Or very different indeed.”
CHAPTER THREE
The next several hours passed in a whirlwind of activity. Lord Engal rushed off to find the nearest telegraph office and send a flurry of wires. Miss Marlende and Daniel followed to make sure he sent wires to everyone Dr Marlende and Professor Abindon thought should be notified too. Emilie, wide awake now, took notes for them as they made further observations with the telescope, writing down directions and rows of numbers. After a short time, more people started to arrive, men and quite a number of women, all natural philosophers, aetheric scholars, or engineers.
They entered the chamber, often disheveled and in one case still wearing a dressing gown, looked into the telescope, and then retired to join one of the many groups having low-voiced, worried conversations.
At first Emilie’s head was almost spinning. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to run into the street yelling a warning, or hide under the bench. Were they actually being invaded? Please let it be a friendly explorer. Invasions were something that happened in books, to made-up countries. The last invasion she had read about in the history books had happened to a small country called Tuthari, far to the east. A fleet of pirates had invaded their archipelago, and had been driven off by their ships and the other traders that had been in port at the time, including two Menaen steamers.
The idea of an invasion by strange people in airships was terrifying. It certainly put the whole “Uncle Yeric seeing your name in the newspapers” episode into perspective. Emilie began to look fondly back on the time when that was all she had to worry about.
She reminded herself not to panic yet. There’s plenty of time to panic later, she thought.
As the sky past the big windows started to lighten, a man in a very sober suit came in to speak quietly to Dr Marlende and Professor Abindon. Emilie was close enough to hear him say, “Lord Engal has called a meeting of the Society in the main lecture hall. He wanted you to go over your findings briefly, if you could.” He added, “Dr Amalus, advisor to the Ministry and the Ruling Council, is in attendance. He expects to give a report to them based on, well, your report to him.”
Dr Marlende and Professor Abindon exchanged a dark look. She said, “Isn’t this premature?”
“That rather depends, doesn’t it?” Dr Marlende answered grimly.
She took a deep breath. “Yes, of course.”
They started downstairs, most of the others present following them. Emilie found her way through the crowd and trailed behind Miss Marlende. At the bottom of the stairs, Daniel fetched up beside them. There were still more people down here, milling around, though most had taken more care with their dress than the earlier arrivals.
Emilie thought Miss Marlende would follow Dr Marlende and the professor into the lecture hall, but instead she took Emilie’s sleeve and directed them both toward the open front doors. Daniel followed them.
As they stepped outside, the cool pre-dawn air was like a welcome dash of cold water. A coach with the Ministry’s crest emblazoned on the door was just drawing up in front of the building. Miss Marlende watched it thoughtfully, and said, “Let’s take a break, shall we?”
They ended up in a bakery down a nearby side street, open earlier than anything else so it could supply fresh bread to the other eating establishments. It had tables in its back courtyard and also served tea. With a napkin full of breakfast rolls and a big mug of tea in her stomach, Emilie started to feel less confused and panicky. Maybe I’m not terrified, maybe I’m just hungry, she thought. Or maybe she had just had a little time to get used to the whole idea. Around a mouthful of roll, she asked Miss Marlende, “Why aren’t you at the meeting?”
Miss Marlende stirred her tea, her brow set in a worried frown. “I know what they’re going to say.”
Daniel held his tea under his nose as if it were smelling salts and he was trying to revive himself. The steam made his eyeglasses cloud over. “Dr Marlende thinks we should go up for a better look?”
Miss Marlende nodded. “It’s the only thing we can do, at this point.”
“Up in an airship?” Emilie asked, then realized what a stupid question it was. No, up in a tugboat, Emilie, what do you think? But the others were so tired, all they did was nod soberly. “Have you ever done it before? I mean, in an aetheric current, not just the air.”
“Yes, we’ve explored two of the major aether currents above Menea,” Miss Marlende explained. “Father became more interested in the belowsea currents because the signs that they led to another aetheric plane were so intriguing. We didn’t see any such signs in the air currents. As far as I know, no one ever has.” She took a long drink of her tea. “Perhaps we just didn’t look hard enough.”
Daniel shook his head. “There isn’t as much interest in airship travel in general. It’s very dangerous. There have been at least two air-current expeditions that ended in disaster. One crashed and one was never seen again.”
The bad storms that plagued the seas along the best trade routes were dangerous for airships. Ships navigating via surface aether currents had always been safer and more efficient, so airships weren’t popular, even for relatively safe travel between the mainland and the coastal islands. They had been mostly used as pleasure craft over land. Emilie said, “So no one really knows what’s in the aetheric currents up there. I suppose because we can see the sky, we just assumed there’s nothing past it.” She followed that thought for a moment. “Just like everyone in the Hollow World assumed there was nothing above them.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “Isn’t there an old, discredited theory that the world is a series of concentric circles?”
Emilie had seen some mention of that in a book somewhere but hadn’t paid it much attention. She had been mostly reading for the adventure stories of exploration, not the speculation on aetheric structures. But she remembered the picture that had accompanied it, all different circles, stretching out into infinity. Their world, this world, had been labeled the “surface world” and had been shown on top. “This means that theory is right, but we aren’t the surface world,” Emilie said. “We’re not on top; we’re just one of the circles.”
“Yes, it’s been a theory for a long time,” Miss Marlende admitted. She sipped her tea and added, “Apparently, it’s on its way to becoming a fact.”
They started back to the Philosophical Society, and as they turned a corner to the street, Emilie saw a small crowd milling in front of the building. Some of them were clutching notebooks and pencils and were probably journalists, others just looked like confused passersby who had seen something was happening and had stopped to find out what it was. A few early peddlers had gathered on the outskirts, and a vegetable cart on its way to the open market had stopped along the curb and appeared to be trying to take advantage of the unexpected crowd.
As they approached the building, a man suddenly turned toward them out of the fringe of the crowd and rushed toward Miss Marlende.
His face was tight with fury and Emilie reacted before she quite knew what she was doing. As Daniel stepped in front of Miss Marlende, Emilie dodged sideways toward the vegetable cart and snatched up a hard-shelled melon. She braced to throw it at the man’s head.
“Stop!” Miss Marlende held up her hands. “It’s all right, Emilie, Daniel.”
The man jerked to a halt in front of Miss Marlende and demanded, “Is it true?”
Miss Marlende gently pushed Daniel aside and said, “It is, but it isn’t them. It’s a strange craft.”
Emilie set the melon back on the cart with an apologetic nod to the startled vendor. Her reflexes seemed to be still tuned to the Hollow World, and at some point, snatching up a weapon had become more natural to her than screaming or running.
Emilie had time to notice that the man really didn’t look much like a ruffian at all. Though, of course, neither had Lord Ivers. He was young, maybe no more than twenty-five or so. His clothes were well-tailored and his tightly curled hair was carefully cut, but there was something about him which suggested that he wasn’t well. His light brown skin was a little dull, his coat and jacket hanging on knobby shoulders as if he was normally slim but had also lost weight.
The man glanced at Emilie and Daniel with an impatient grimace, then faced Miss Marlende again. “Are you going up?”
Miss Marlende said, “Probably.”
He nodded sharply with a brief expression of relief. “You’ll look for them.”
“Mr Deverrin…” Miss Marlende’s face was a mix of frustration and pity. “They are all dead. Surely you must know that.”
He set his jaw stubbornly. “And you and I both know that means nothing. Especially after the trip you’ve just returned from.”
Miss Marlende said, patiently, “Even if they were in a current that… led somewhere, there is little chance that after all this time–”
“Little chance is not no chance.” He turned away abruptly and strode toward the crowd, shouldering through it.
Miss Marlende let her breath out and rubbed her forehead. “That was unpleasant.”
Emilie demanded, “Who was that?”
“Anton Deverrin. His father, Dr Deverrin, led the second airship aether-current expedition, the one that Daniel mentioned. The one that was never seen again.” Miss Marlende shook her head. “It was last year. There was a sudden storm, with a great disturbance in the aether, the day after they launched. There was no sign of the airship after that. There were twelve people aboard, including Anton’s brother, sister, and two cousins, as well as his father. His mother and the other members of the family threw all their efforts and their family fortune into searching for them. It ruined them, eventually. They wanted my father to mount an expedition in search of them, but…”
Emilie winced. She could glimpse the scene beyond Miss Marlende’s brief description: the grief and hope and desperation of a family suddenly ripped apart. No wonder the young man still looked ill. “But Dr Marlende thought they were dead.”
“Yes,” Miss Marlende admitted. “We – and everyone else – thought the airship must have been torn apart over the sea. Lord Engal and some of the other explorers with steamers searched the area for survivors for days afterward, but they never even found a sign of any debris.”
Emilie hesitated. “But now…”
Daniel’s thoughts must have been moving along the same line. He said, “Maybe we were all wrong.”
“Yes. In light of this new information, we could have been.” Miss Marlende bit her lip. “But it’s been more than a year. I don’t want to get his hopes up. Even if they were trapped somewhere, they may have died by now.”
“Maybe they were lucky,” Emilie said. “Maybe they found nice people like the Cirathi who helped them.”
Miss Marlende gave her a sad and somewhat ironic smile. “You usually aren’t such an optimist, Emilie.”
“Well, I’m trying to be better at it.” Emilie agreed, though, there was no use getting the poor man’s hopes up. A year was a long time to spend trapped or adventuring in aether currents without getting killed. Their trip to the Hollow World had proved that.
Daniel didn’t look optimistic. “But if the air currents are like the sea currents, we still couldn’t find them unless we knew where they left their current.” He looked toward the crowd the young man had disappeared into. “I agree, we certainly can’t make him any promises.”
Emilie realized they had all made a rather important assumption. “So we’re going up in an air aether current to look at the strange craft, then?”
“I would say there is an excellent chance of it,” Miss Marlende said.
The meeting was finished by the time they entered the Society building. Coaches were starting to leave, tangling with the early morning traffic of omnibuses and delivery carts. They found Dr Marlende and Professor Abindon in the hall with Lord Engal, all surrounded by a small crowd of Society members and other people still discussing the strange object and its implications. Emilie thought the mood was a little less tense. Maybe confronting the problem and discussing it had helped. And if Miss Marlende was right, now they had a plan. Or at least a plan to get more information.
Miss Marlende elbowed her way through the crowd to Dr Marlende’s side, waited until the man he was speaking to took his leave, and then said, “We’re going up in the airship, then?”
“Yes,” he told her. “It’s fortunate the larger craft is airworthy and can be made ready in a short time. If we don’t get some idea of what this thing is soon, there could be a panic when the word spreads.”
Miss Marlende jerked her head toward the crowd. “And with this lot, the word will definitely spread.”
Dr Marlende turned toward the door. “It was necessary to inform them.” As Professor Abindon caught up with them, he continued, “Many of them have small scopes and would start to make their own observations. The professor here is an expert at aetheric interpretation, but the anomaly is growing large enough that amateurs will be able to see it soon.”
Professor Abindon snorted. “If you hadn’t gone haring off into the subsurface world and gotten stuck, we would have been able to start sooner.”
Emilie had noted that natural philosophers seemed big on saying “I told you so.” She didn’t think it was very helpful in a crisis.
Dr Marlende gave Abindon a look, but said only, “And I would know a good deal less about the practical difficulties of aether current travel.” He told Miss Marlende, “Besides, we had to assemble the Society. We may need their help.”
Miss Marlende’s expression bordered on the bitter. “They weren’t a great deal of help when Kenar and I desperately needed it.”
“Did they all support Lord Ivers?” Emilie asked. The inner workings of the Philosophical Society seemed a lot more exciting than she had previously thought.
Miss Marlende said, “Many of them thought that it would have been impossible to retrace Father’s route, even though Kenar himself was proof that it was possible. The ones that didn’t had no real resources to offer.”
Like poor Mr Deverrin, Emilie thought. But at least in his case, the storm had given everyone good reason to think that his family was dead.
Professor Abindon said, “I wish you had come to me. I’m also lacking in those sorts of resources, but at least I could have…” She sounded hesitant, which seemed very uncharacteristic of her. “Helped somehow.”
“I didn’t think you’d care,” Miss Marlende said, her voice quite cool.
Emilie saw Daniel wince. Fortunately, at that moment, Lord Engal caught up with them. He said, “I’ve sent for the coaches. I presume we’re going back to the airyard immediately?”
Dr Marlende looked both relieved and exasperated. “I assumed you would stay here and coordinate with the Society.”
Lord Engal seemed to find this an asto
nishing assumption on Dr Marlende’s part. “Of course not. That’s what Elathorn is for. If he isn’t for things like that, then there’s no point in having him.”
“I’m sure he would disagree,” Miss Marlende said.
“I don’t care if he agrees.” As they came out of the big double doors into the morning sun, Lord Engal jammed his hat on his head. “This is going to be a historic encounter and I’m certainly not missing it.”
Once they reached the airyard, the rest of the day became a blur of activity. The larger airship that was docked there was technically airworthy, but it had to be completely checked over and prepared for aetheric travel. And the air-producing equipment, similar to what had been used on the Sovereign, needed to be installed in it and brought up to working order. Apparently, the air got thinner the higher up you went, and the aether current would be taking them very high. They would need the protective shield spell and the devices for making breathable air, just as the Sovereign had in its voyage through the sea bottom to the Hollow World.
Except it’s not really the Hollow World, Emilie reminded herself. It’s just the next step down. The way they were the next step down for whoever was coming in from above them.
Emilie was introduced to a dozen or so men and a few young women, some of whom worked as Dr Marlende’s mechanics and engineers, and others who were students of aetheric principles. The mechanics and engineers accepted her matter-of-factly, possibly because she was with Miss Marlende and had been on the Sovereign. The students stared jealously, probably for exactly the same reasons. She was very relieved to find Seth, Cobbier, and Mikel there. They had been with Dr Marlende on the Hollow World expedition, and she had helped rescue them. They greeted her like an old comrade. When she had first seen them, they had all been quite dirty and scruffy, having been held prisoner for some time. Now they all looked like what they were: advanced scholars of aetheric engineering and philosophy. She wished Charter was here too, but he had been badly wounded in their escape and had been sent home to recuperate.